CCanberra - info.cmtedd.act.gov.auinfo.cmtedd.act.gov.au/Canberra100/storage/ThinkofitDreamofitIan... · for the Australian metropolis … [they have] ... site. And then, a little

CCanberraIn six snapshots

Think of it ! Dream of it !

Cover images, all courtesy of the National Library of Australia (top to bottom): Senators bathe in the Snowy River, 1902, one of the stunning photographs in Edmund Thomas Luke’s ‘Tour of Senators’ album; (Robert) Charles Coulter’s watercolour painting, with its Europeanised vision of an Australian capital city at Lake George, near Canberra, 1901; one of an abundance of caricatures of eccentric Australian politician King O’Malley, this one a watercolour by artist Will Dyson; Lionel Lindsay’s drawing of an idealised Australian capital city at Dalgety, which appeared in The Lone Hand on April Fool’s Day, 1908; Norman Lindsay cartoon depicting an Australian ‘bush capital’ city – published in the Bulletin, a journal which took great delight in satirising the Canberra site; ‘Canberra, view from Camp Hill looking towards St John’s Church, Mt Ainslie in the distance’, 1924, by H M Rolland (courtesy, Betsy Dunn).

Canberra Think of it! Dream of it! in six snapshots

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Copyright © Ian Warden, 2009

The ACT Government has permanent, royalty-free licence to use, reproduce and disseminate information in all series booklets for its Centenary of Canberra projects.

w ISBN 978-0-9807394-1-1w GPO Box 158, Canberra ACT 2601w Tel: 13 22 81w www.canberra100.com.au

A publication of the Chief Minister’s Department, ACT Government – to commemorate the Centenary of Canberra, 1913–2013

CanberraThink of it! Dream of it!

Ian Warden

How Canberra and its Rival Sites Battled to be Chosen as Australia’s Federal City

in six snapshots

Canberra Think of it! Dream of it! In six snapshots 4

‘The Shrivelled Senators’Senators Embark, in February 1902, on the

First ‘Pilgrimage’ in Search ofa Federal Capital Site

The Senators of Australia have nobly gone forth to accomplish the hazardous and arduous task of prospecting for a suitable site for the Australian metropolis … [they have] faced the terrors and tortures of the great Australian bush … and the terrible vicissitudes that were endured by the brave pioneers who left their bones to whiten upon the sandy wastes of our dear island home.

Punch (being tongue-in-cheek), 27 February 1902

1

Canberra Think of it! Dream of it! In six snapshots5

The story of the Senators’ February 1902 tour of proposed federal capital sites (scoffed at by some as a ‘picnic’ but in this essay we’ll imitate the wit who called it a ‘pilgrimage’) is a great Australian story, sometimes poignant and important, sometimes frivolous and comical. It cries out to be made into a fine opera or a fine feature film.

Theirs was, importantly, the first of all of the several site-seeking pilgrimages of tall-poppy ‘pilgrims’ out and away from the plush comforts of Melbourne and into the New South Wales wilderness. Their adventures and hardships (the accompanying man from the Argus reported that especially early in the pilgrimage ‘the strongest bond between those on the tour was common suffering’) amused and inspired writers and cartoonists, and also inspired, when some pilgrims were up to their Senatorial nipples in the Snowy River at Dalgety, one of the best-known of all Australian photographs.1

The feature film of the expedition could, plausibly, be a musical since local brass bands often met the Senators and since the Senators sometimes sang to one another to pass the time on the enormous, tedious train and carriage journeys. One of the pilgrimage’s train journeys, from Armidale to Bungendore, took seventeen hours. One of the ‘stars of the [theatre] company’, the grateful travelling reporter from the Argus reported, was Senator McGregor ‘who good-humouredly boasts that he sings the sentiments of seventeen languages and the music of none’.2 On occasions the Senators and others on the tour became part

of a warbling concert party to sing (and recite, and tell jokes of great antiquity) to their local

hosts.

The pilgrimage of inspections began with

the leaving of Melbourne on 11 February and finished at

the coast in Eden on 23 February. In this short time the pilgrims (their

numbers fluctuated as people joined and left the tour) hared to and fro between, and in this order: Albury, Wagga-Wagga, Gundagai, Tumut, Yass, Goulburn, Orange, Sydney, Armidale, Bungendore, Tarago, Cooma, Dalgety, Bombala and then Eden.

The pilgrimage took the pilgrims out into a New South Wales being baked and burned by the prevailing ‘Federation’ drought always afflicting somewhere in eastern Australia between 1895 and 1903. ‘The scourge of 1902 was not as other droughts’, Bernard O’Reilly of Jenolan in New South Wales was to reminisce. ‘There was a hopelessness which had entered the hearts of the people – a feeling that rain would never fall again’.3

The true pilgrimage began from sweltering Albury’s railway station on 12 February. Rail travel was crucial to the pilgrimage and for parts of it Senators used a special train, albeit not one so special as the one a cartoon in the Bulletin depicted as a plush supertrain equipped with carriages for a smoke room, an observation car and billiard room, a bar, a library and music room (in the cartoon this had its own pianist seated at a piano on its roof), a champagne chamber for ice (for the champagne), a hospital and assorted carriages for foodstuffs with, for example, a meat car and behind it a poultry car.

We know lots about the pilgrimage not only because journalists wrote so much about it but also because one of the party, Senator Lieutenant-Colonel J.C. Neild, was a pilgrim but also an embedded correspondent who wrote a highly readable chronicle of the first part of the tour for newspapers. We’re imitating his version of things when we call the tour a ‘pilgrimage’ and its members ‘pilgrims’. The frivolity of his versions of things upset some of the Senators (some had an earnest sense of being engaged in great national business) and they cold-shouldered him, imparting some tensions to the pilgrimage.

The photographs in Edmund Thomas Luke’s album (left), ‘Tour of Senators’, beautifully capture the character and energy of the 1902 tour of prospective capital sites by a number of Australian politicians. A selection of these

distinctive photographs appear throughout this booklet, each with its own inscribed, original caption. The ‘Senators bathing in the Snowy River at Dalgety’ (far left) is the

album’s most popular ‘snapshot’.


The party gathered at a sweltering Albury

and went out to look at its district on

12 February when there was, Neild chronicled,

‘a temperature approximating to the Black Hole

of Calcutta’. In the early morning of the

awful day they all had what Neild

called ‘a warm and dusty time

of it’ and then ‘the morning

progressed to a greater

degree of unpleasantness

as 11 o’clock was reached,

when a lively dust storm

enhanced the unhappiness

of the pilgrims’. Albury did

not seem to ‘catch on’ with

the pilgrims, Neild noticed.

‘ “Nice position for a federal

cemetery” says one. “Hot as a

stokehole” says another; and, in

view of the sirocco blowing from the

west, and filling eyes, nose, ears, mouth, hair,

and clothing with a surfeit of filth and covering

every object a hundred yards distant with a

curtain of yellow dust, pilgrims may be forgiven

if they fail to recognise Albury as the Federal

Mecca …’ And so on to Wagga-Wagga where,

Neild recorded, ‘arriving in a tornado of dust’

the pilgrims clambered into cars provided to

take them to Wagga’s promised land of an ideal

site. And then, a little out of town and in a vile

season when there were blazes everywhere,

‘they encountered a fierce bush fire … jumping

from their carriages, a number of Senators

commenced to fight the flames … Senators,

notably those from Queensland and Western

Australia, put in excellent work beating out the

rapidly-extending flames’.4

J.C Neild became newsworthy on this pilgrimage not only for his controversial chronicle but also for letting down the pilgrims’ usually high standards of politeness towards local hosts. He snapped at a host in Orange that he, the host, was wasting the Senators’ time by showing them a place, the Canobolas site, that was just ‘confounded goat country’. Melbourne’s weekly Punch duly published a cartoon: Senatorial

Experiences in Goatville. In it, Senators are being

monstered by monstrous goats and Senator

Neild has just been butted into thin air (he’s

the flying Senator with the white moustache).

He’s complaining: ‘Have I, The Magnificent

One, Travelled To This Miserable

District To Be The Butt Of A

Common Goat?’5

The pilgrimage was

a godsend to the

irreverent press

and, as well as the

Goatville picture,

Punch published The

Lost Capital Seekers

showing Senators

posed in a desolate and

bone-strewn landscape

and despairing that

‘Death is staring us in the

face. Only two days’ supply

of champagne remains!’6 Another

Punch cartoon, The Shrivelled Senators, featuring

Beelzebub himself, chortled at the way in which

the Senators found Albury so hot they feared

they might have accidentally strayed down into

the fiery furnaces of Hell.7

But after the horrors of Albury and Wagga-Wagga the weather and the sites became more bearable. Some proffered sites even exerted some charm. One of the minor charmers, visited in the twilight of the pilgrimage and after a deeply charming experience of picturesquely placed and apparently miraculously healthy Tumut (where, locals told the pilgrims, no-one ever died of disease but only ever of very, very old age), was Dalgety. It was destined to be gazetted in 1904 as the officially chosen federal capital site and to come desperately close to winning the final ‘Battle of the Sites.’ Dalgety’s occasional freezing bleakness was to horrify lots of Parliamentary pilgrims who visited it at bleaker times of the year, but these first pilgrims descended on Dalgety in hot February. For some of them the cool, snowfed waters of Dalgety’s great blessing and virtue as a potential federal capital site, the dependable Snowy River, were irresistible.

JC Neild

National Library of Australia


Two of the Melbourne Punch cartoons, recording

with wry humour the experiences of the

Australian politicians during their up-country

capital search.

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Some pilgrims (at this

stage the party consisted

of about thirty Senators,

plus assorted members

of the state Parliament,

journalists, officials and

local dignitaries) went

for a refreshing wallow

and the accompanying

photographer, E.T. Luke,

captured the occasion.

Australians love this

photograph. Why?

Perhaps it’s because it

shows parliamentarians

at their least pompous.

Nakedness renders us

all equal, and without their gentlemanly

finery and at play (albeit a little self-consciously, like

inhibited hippos, perhaps because the photographer

needed them to stay still), they’re like any cluster of

knockabout dads and uncles.8

‘The party did not get away from Dalgety without

some speech-making’ the by now speech-jaded

man from the Telegraph noted, although the

speechy meeting in a hall blossomed into a concert

‘highly appreciated by the crowd who thronged

the doorways and windows’. Sentimental ballads

loomed large. Senator McGregor’s version of the

tear-jerking Scottish ballad The Anchor’s Weighed

(‘The tear fell gently from her eye; /When last

we parted from the shore, / My bosom heaved

with many a sigh, / To think I might see her no

more.’) made a deep emotional impression, even

on tough locals who fancied themselves as being

chips off the rugged block of the man described

in The Man From Snowy River. And the concert

was enriched by someone’s recitation of ‘Banjo’

Paterson’s classic.9 And so on to Bombala, where for

the locals the touring concert party of pilgrims gave

yet another concert of songs and of Jurassic jokes.

The pilgrimage ended at Eden, the potential federal

capital port for a federal capital city at Bombala, with

some pilgrims going back to Melbourne by rail and

road, and with some going back by sea.

Sir William Lyne, compromised on an Albury

station fence, as a number of his amused colleagues look on – including three

future Prime Ministers: Alfred Deakin, Billy Hughes

and Chris Watson.


This pioneering pilgrimage

was surely a fine educational

experience for the Senators.

Like all of the subsequent site-

inspecting parliamentary pilgrims

they saw places and met folk and

heard brass bands not dreamed of

in their imaginations.

Nor were the locals always awe-

inspired in the presence of their

august visitors. At Tumut, Senator

Neild noticed that the pilgrims

were ‘stared at in chilling silence

by groups of the residents’,

while at Bathurst he found their

train met by ‘an irate deputation’

cranky about the insulting brevity

of the pilgrims’ scheduled visit.10

The Melbourne weekly Punch,

distilling all it had heard of the

social and political chemistry

of these unique interfaces of

Senators and local ‘backblockers of

New South Wales’, reported that

something reassuringly wonderful had emerged. It

was the discovery that the ‘backblockers’ weren’t after

all ‘numbskulls, with grass seed in their whiskers and

grasshoppers in their hair, who can be taken down

by city confidence men [the Senators]’ but were after

all ‘an enterprising and wide-awake people’. We’d

discovered this, Punch reported, because everywhere

the locals had exploited the visitors:

When Senators have wanted vehicles to carry them up and down and around the alleged magnificent localities, the residents have supplied the vehicles – at a charge in advance of ordinary rates. It is also recorded that generous residents have invaded the trains bearing the Senators and have devoured the edibles provided for the pioneers of the new metropolis … [the locals are] hustlers, who, seeing an opportunity, grab it with both hands and shake all the loose change out of it … The country that owns a population with such a splendid capacity for taking care of itself has no occasion to despair. Australia has a great future before her; we are quite sure of it now.11

The Canobolas/Orange site was a popular capital option in the early ‘Battle of the Site’ years, especially with one of the era’s most influential politicians, George Reid.


‘An Immense PumpkinChased Me’

Competing Federal Capital SitesBlow Their Own Trumpets

2


‘Advertising’, the Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock thought, ‘is the science of arresting the human intelligence for long enough to get money from it’. New South Wales locals attempted lots of arresting of human intelligence as, from just before Federation in 1901 and until the final decision late in 1908 to make Yass-Canberra the federal capital site, they advertised floridly in talk and print (often through specially formed local Federal Capital Leagues) their heavenly habitats as the perfect places for the nation’s federal capital city to be built.

And to be fair to these folk, some of the attempted intelligence-arresting wasn’t to do just with money, development and jobs but came from a sincere love of the place they were recommending. All of us who have ever desperately wanted to sell something or who have been hopelessly in love (with a place or a person) will recognise and sympathise with the purple-prosed tone of what New South Wales locals wrote and said to sing their sites’ praises.

But however hard locals tried, no-one arrested the keen intelligence of New South Wales Commissioner Alexander Oliver when over many months, and beginning in 1899, he considered forty-five proffered sites, visited twenty-three of them (going to some of them again and again) and at fourteen of them held public inquiries.

Oliver, later, had great fun describing the attempts made to beguile him with lies and exaggerations. ‘In the course of my inspections’, he was to recall with amusement, ‘nothing struck me as more remarkable than the unswerving loyalty of the witnesses to their climate’:

No matter what the day temperature might be, the nights were always cool, and if the districts rejoiced in a steady sequence of seasonable frosts, the inhabitants were all the better for them … Where such enclosures as cemeteries existed I was assured that nine tenths of the occupants had been ‘undesirables’ who came to the township as a last resort. Medical men came, looked and went away disheartened [because of a lack

of sick people] or if they stayed cultivated an orchard or vineyard. An immense pumpkin chased me around several sites. It was the silent witness for climate as well as soil, and not being liable to cross examination, did yeoman’s service. Finally there was the hale old man of past 80, and the cured consumptive, all bearing eloquent testimony to the matchless salubrity of their site.12

Oliver was hardly exaggerating at all. All important site-considerers had to hear or to read testimonies just like these.

And as was the case with everywhere else he went, attempts were made to arrest Commissioner Oliver’s intelligence when he held a public hearing, mostly about the Canberra site, at Queanbeyan on 11 June 1900. The Canberra site as described to him by significant locals sounded like an improbable combination of Lourdes, the famous shrine where health is restored by miracles, and the Garden of Eden.

After local doctors had testified to the great ages that locals lived to in the region, some more local authorities, including John Gale, the fulsomely pro-Canberra site Queanbeyan newspaperman, and Frederick Campbell, the grand Canberra grazier, gave some ‘immense-pumpkin’ kinds of testimony about the region’s fabulous fecundity. Gale said that he’d ‘grown nearly every species of English fruit’ in his Queanbeyan garden and that his table grapes always won first prize at the Sydney Agricultural Show.

Campbell, hyperbolically (you have to wonder

what the detached and sceptical Oliver made

Frederick Campbell

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of Campbell’s extreme testimony) told Oliver

that a capital built at the Canberra site, even

if a metropolis of 40,000 souls, could be

effortlessly and amply fed by its own bountiful

region since he’d known yields of sixty bushels

of wheat to the acre there. What was more,

‘You could grow anything that can be grown

in the south of England’, and local grasses were

‘remarkably fattening for sheep and cattle’ while

‘quinces, apricots, apples, peaches, loquats,

gooseberries and table grapes are grown and

wine has been made in the district and malting

barley [for brewing] has been grown’.

Campbell also said that the fact that ‘Canberra

Church [St John’s], a heavy building with

a spire, shows no cracking’ proved that big

buildings of the kind a city would need, would

have firm foundations on this dream spot.13

Locals claimed for their places magical proofs of local health and longevity (engineered by perfect climate and water) and also claimed breathtaking picturesqueness. A witness extolling the Gadara site at Tumut told the Commonwealth Commissioners that ‘the oldest people in the State have spent a lifetime on the proposed site at Gadara’, and then proceeded to name and to date many of them. ‘Mr Williams of Adelong Crossing died recently at the age of 102, the next neighbour, a little further up, Mr Franklin, reached between 90 and 100’, and Mr Franklin’s wife ‘lived till considerably over 100 years’. The witness knew of someone perverse enough to let the region down by dying in his mere 70s but he’d had ‘something the matter with his jaw’.14

Visiting Tumut in February 1902 with the famous first federal Parliamentary tour of inspection, the man from the Argus newspaper found that Tumut was ‘a little hillside town, where, according to local testimony, nobody ever dies except of old age [but] this however seems to be the case in most of the places with sites to offer’.15 And Gadara was, another local zealot proclaimed, as well as standing in a valley where ‘a drought or a really bad season is unknown’, delightfully picturesque:

Standing upon its most elevated peak, a glorious

sketch of landscape and mountain scenery

unfolds itself to the visitor. At his feet lies the

Gilmore Valley, which yields forty bushels of

wheat and eighty bushels of maize per acre as an

average crop. Snug homesteads, embowered in

smiling fertile fields, are everywhere to be seen

[and nearby] the Bogong Mountains … stand as

a guard over the valley.16

The Bombala Federal Capital League claimed that the region was ‘a health resort’:

Zymotic and pulmonary diseases and serious epidemics are almost unknown, the death-rate, averaging about nine per thousand for some years past, bearing eloquent testimony to the health-giving properties and climate of the district … For the benefit of dyspeptic and rheumatic subjects, several springs – the waters of which are impregnated with sulphur, soda, lithia, magnesia, iron and other mineral salts naturally effervescent and having valuable medicinal qualities – exist … No more suitable spot for the residence of the Governor-General, his staff, the Legislature, the Commander-in-Chief and military officers, the permanent, legal, and Government officials and the fashionable society, naturally gravitating towards a capital city and seat of Government, can be imagined.17

Sometimes, but rarely, local champions even addressed issues of impregnability and said theirs was the most foe-resistant, impregnable place in New South Wales. One champion of the western sites (especially Bathurst) pointed out that ‘the West is protected by the natural fortresses of the Blue Mountains from inimical

St John’s Church, about the time of Federation

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expeditions … no one power alone … could contemplate with possibility of success the seizure of the Federal Capital, if it were placed in the West [and while] the Federal Capital remained untaken, Australia could never be subjugated’. Meanwhile, the advantages of the West’s ‘central position designate it as the Arsenal of the Interior’.18

In one famous instance a site got its qualities fulsomely advertised not by a local but by someone possessed by a professional/aesthetic enthusiasm. Mr A. Evans, an enthusiast for a federal city posed beside decorative sheets of water, saw wondrous promise in Lake George.19 Today, we know it to be very occasionally a fine sheet of water but more often to be just a vast, flat, tiger-snake-infested and sometimes slightly boggy paddock. At a federal capital city Congress in Melbourne in 1901 Evans got carried away about Lake George as a site. And, rendered to assist him at the Congress, he had the support in his fantasy of Charles Coulter’s now famous, dreamily-lovely, fanciful vision of the federal capital city at Lake George.20

‘Water is health-giving and pleasure-giving’, Evans rhapsodised, ‘and is the most important

factor in affording a grand perspective to a

noble city [and] it is the object of this paper to

show that Lake George will afford the loveliest

waterside site the heart of man can desire’.21

Few of us who know nondescript and usually

waterless Lake George (it’s beside the highway

between Canberra and Goulburn) can recognise

it from Mr Evan’s fulsome description. To him it

is vaster (‘seventeen miles across’) and deeper

(‘in some parts the bottom has never been

found’) and more beautiful (‘the contour of

the land resembles Sydney Harbour, but more

particularly that beautiful part of it called Middle

Harbour’) and more fecund (‘the water abounds

with Murray Cod and other fish’) and more

perfectly sited (‘it would be an easy matter to

run a railway line on to Kiandra and so open

up the Switzerland of Australia [to] afford the

citizens of the Commonwealth all the pleasure

of the Swiss Alps and Canada’) than the true

Lake George we know.22

‘Had the Venetians a better opportunity of

building Venice than we now have of building

the Federal Capital on Lake George? Here we

may create a new Venice – only a perfect one …’

enthused the poetical Evans, as transported away

by the loveliness of Lake George (which he may

have ogled on a perfect day) as Wordsworth was

by the loveliness of a host of golden daffodils

beside a lake always far more reliably full of

water than Lake George (at the time of writing

utterly dry, yet again, and this time for the past

seven years) can ever be.23


Bracing PlacesWhy it was Essential for the Federal Capital Site

to Have ‘Cheek-Tinting’ Air

3


How did Australians, today famously beach-

loving in their play and famously coast-hugging

in their choices of where to live, choose an

inland, elevated, often-frosty site for a federal

capital? Why was it that almost all of the

seriously considered contenders for the federal

capital site were well inland, well elevated (for

example, rivals Canberra and Dalgety were at a

lofty 580 metres and 760 metres respectively)

and in places that, for some part of the year,

were chilly and with ‘cheek-tinting air’? 24

Before we look at the fascinating true

explanations, we should look at the most

popularly supposed one. This is the notion,

amusing to us living in times when missiles can

criss-cross the world, that the capital had to be

built out of reach of bombardment and invasion

from the sea. Certainly questions of defence

against these horrors were important to some.

Bombala is the ideal site, a Bombala man wrote

to the Sydney and Bombala papers in 1899,

because even in the event of the enemy ‘taking

Eden [the town on the coast at the closest point

to Bombala, fifty-six kilometres away] and a

march made for the capital, an enemy would

find an impassable barrier in the Tantawangalo

Ranges, the passes of which a small detachment

could hold against an army’. He felt the enemy,

knowing this, wouldn’t even bother to try to

march on impregnable Bombala.25

The President of the Wagga-Wagga Federal

Capital League, making an inventive virtue of

his town’s remoteness, told visiting Senators

in 1902 that ‘situated as Wagga is – far inland

– it would be difficult of approach by any

invading force, hence it is a desirable place for

the custody of the archives, records, etc., of

the Commonwealth. The water supply could

not be cut off by a hostile force, while the

few commanding hills renders its fortification

simple and perfect’. 26

But defence issues didn’t seem to loom large

in many important imaginations. Of far more

importance was the belief that the federal capital

site must be blessed with a ‘bracing’ climate.

This was a preoccupation of the sprightly,

shooting and sailing, outdoors-adoring New

South Wales Commissioner Alexander Oliver

(indeed, he’d lost his left arm in a shooting

accident) as, appointed late in 1899, he spent

eleven months investigating proposed federal

capital sites. His influential and tone-setting

report is dotted with the word ‘bracing’ and

how one would love to have a dollar for every

time everyone used the word ‘bracing’ over the

duration of the ‘Battle of the Sites’.

But What Was a ‘Bracing’ Climate?What Oliver meant, he said, was that it was an

‘almost indispensable condition’ for a federal

capital that it should be somewhere ‘by reason

of its distance from the sea coast … exempt

from the depressing influences associated

with moist sea breezes’. He felt that science

and personal experience showed that a ‘warm,

moist temperature’ of the kind found along the

New South Wales coast was unhealthy, and was

physically and intellectually energy-sapping.

What was needed for the health and comfort of

‘the various classes of the body politic whose

home … will be at the Seat of Government’

was ‘a bracing, recuperative climate’ with ‘pure

bracing mountain air … at the same time a

stimulant and a tonic’. In New South Wales,

he was sure, this was ‘the air of our more

elevated tablelands and plateaux [sic]’, where

there would be many frosts during the year.27

Oliver was didactic about this but he wasn’t

being controversial. Everyone already knew that

‘bracing’ places were best.

We can arrange the reasons why it was thought

best into two big, embracing and sometimes

overlapping categories. One has to do with

climate and intelligence and the other with

climate and health.


Climate and IntelligenceThere was a popular scientific belief prevailing early

in the twentieth century (and enjoying a scholarly

renaissance in our own times) that different climates

determined the very different abilities of the races

that lived in them. This notion is sometimes called

‘Environmental Determinism’. Temperate, cool

climates with short winter spells of tolerable cold

were thought to have helped produce the best races

with the best brains. Some of the Victorian thinking

and writing on this subject seems shockingly

racist to us today because so much of it points to

the superiority of white Europeans, peoples of

temperate/cold places, over coloured peoples native

to hot and tropical places.

It was a belief with ancient origins, the Greek geographer Strabo suggesting it in his Geography (about 18 AD). But by the early years of the twentieth century it was a belief popularised and circulated in the writings of, among others, Friedrich Ratzel and his influential disciples including Ellen Churchill Semple. Charles Darwin had subscribed to the notion in his The Descent of Man, continuously in print after 1871. He wrote that while ‘many savages’ never make any kind of progress in ‘the scale of civilisation’, others do make progress and are obviously helped in this by ‘a cool climate’ because it encourages physical and intellectual busyness. You could even see this, he said, in the Esquimaux [sic] who ought really to be as backward and disappointing as other sorts of savages and yet, ‘pressed by hard necessity, have succeeded in many ingenious inventions’ although, alas, ‘their climate has been too severe for continued progress’.28

‘The influence of climate upon race temperament … can not be doubted, despite the occasional exception like the cheery, genial Eskimos’, Ellen Semple wrote, translating and distilling Ratzel:

The northern peoples of Europe are energetic, provident, serious … Everywhere a cold climate puts a steadying hand on the human heart and brain … Where man has remained in the Tropics … he has suffered arrested development because a moist warm, uniform climate which supplied abundantly his simple wants put no strain upon his feeble intellect and will … the most excellent peoples occur in climates where Nature makes some demands.29

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Portrait of Charles Darwin


Folksy distillations of these sorts of big ideas cropped up again and again whenever the eligibility of federal capital sites was discussed.

‘I challenge honorable senators’, the pro-Dalgety Senator Lynch challenged, ‘to deny that the evidence of all history goes to show that the hardiest of the white races are those who come from the colder climates.’

‘Everyone knows that,’ piped up Senator Gray.

‘Touching the frigidity of Dalgety which has so recently caused some politicians to shiver,’ Senator Lynch continued, ‘if the Capital is situated at Dalgety it will be in a cool region, where we can rear the best type of manhood’.30

‘We are told that the weather at Dalgety is cold’, the pro-Dalgety Dr Maloney lectured the House. ‘[But] I remind honorable members that the stock from which we spring was a race emanating from cold countries. The best part of the blood of the British race comes from a stock emanating from the coldest countries in Europe … the Anglo-Saxon race. Did not the old Vikings come from the cold countries of northern Europe?’31

The Bulletin ruled that you could tell that Tumut was far too hot to be the federal site by noticing (as Commissioner Oliver had, drawing a similar conclusion) that maize grew there. Tumut’s climate, the weekly lectured, ‘is a maize-growing climate [when] the Federal State should have an apple-growing climate as sturdy civilizations don’t grow side by side with maize’.32

King O’Malley told the House of Representatives that, yes, Tumut was too hot, and that ‘the history of the world shows that cold climates have produced the greatest geniuses, all of whom were born north of a certain degree …’ Warming to his cold-climate theme, he continued: ‘Take the sons of some of the greatest men of the world and put them into a hot climate like Tumut or Albury and in three generations their lineal descendants will be degenerate … I want to have a cold climate chosen for the capital of this Commonwealth’.33


Climate and HealthEveryone knew, as the ‘Battle of the Sites’ was being fought, that cold mountain air was good for health and had the kinds of magical ‘recuperative’ qualities Oliver alluded to. Science had shown it. When they could, champions of a site would claim its altitude and the resulting air made it a ‘sanatorium’. Contemporary ‘scientific’ ideas about these things were persuasively captured in a 1900 promotional pamphlet for the famously therapeutic Blue Mountains high behind clammy and unhealthy Sydney. ‘As a sanatorium the Blue Mountains come second to no other region in New South Wales’, the pamphlet bragged:

To quote one authority, mountain air has particular and special chemical and vital properties that make it conspicuous … Mountain air contains a relatively large amount of ozone – one of the most powerful disinfectants known – and it follows that it is a great purifier of the air. Oxonized [sic] air is healthful and invigorating and is ‘cheek-tinting’ too and puts a natural tint into the cheeks as distinctly as, but less spuriously than, the city girl’s hard-worked rouge.34

Beliefs like these underpinned the debate

about where the capital site should be.

Local champions advertised the sweet

frostiness of their sites and claimed that high

temperatures recorded there were unusual.

A Tumut apologist pleaded that a high

summer temperature measured there wasn’t

representative at all but had been taken on one

of ‘the hottest days ever experienced here’, and

worse still from a thermometer unfortunately

sited in the hottest possible place ‘under an

iron-roofed verandah’.35

Alexander Oliver blended the race and health issues when he insisted that ‘Those who have been commissioned to find for the Seat of Government of the Commonwealth a climate as suitable as the conditions of NSW permit, have not been sent out to discover a climate for … a Black republic, but one to which not only will the constitutions of Australians of British descent readily accommodate themselves but by which their physique will be improved, their general health, if impaired, be re-established, and their faculties and energies raised to a higher pitch of usefulness’. 36

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Advertisement for the Hydro-Majestic Hotel in the Blue Mountains – a ‘sanitorium’ resort favoured by a number of Federation politicians. Ironically, Australia’s first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, died while on a holiday there on 7 January 1920.


PicturesquenessIn New South Wales healthy, cheek-tinting air was most abundant in elevated, mountain-framed places and, in ‘Battle of the Sites’ conversations, we find a nice coincidence of healthy places and picturesque places. Since late in the eighteenth century a new attitude towards beauty in nature had emerged. The influential English clergyman, painter and writer William Gilpin (1724-1804), had urged painters and travellers to appreciate the beautiful ‘picturesque’ in nature. Then, as I write, there is the stimulating new ‘Savannah hypothesis’ that says that we seem as a species to have evolved to find savannah-like landscapes especially satisfying to the eye, probably because it was on the African savannahs that hominids split off from chimpanzee lineages and began to thrive and evolve at pace.37

During the ‘Battle of the Sites’ some savannah-like sites, including Tooma, Lyndhurst and Canberra may have enjoyed a prehistoric preference in the minds of those who saw them. Poor Dalgety, with little grass and few trees, was hardly savannah-like at all. Lots of participants in the ‘Battle of the Sites’ conversations said how important picturesqueness was to them. Plain sites were always at a disadvantage. Insofar as picturesqueness mattered, the sylvan Canberra site, the ultimate choice, charmed most that saw it. Even the fanatically pro-Dalgety MP Mr Hutchison had to concede of Dalgety’s main rival, Canberra, ‘I admit the site would make a very pretty cricket pitch’.38


An ‘Outlandish, Freezing Place’or ‘A New Heaven’ ?

The Dalgety Federal Capital Site in Ridicule and Praise

I have been told that an attempt was made at Dalgety to rear Polar bears. But the first couple of bears that could be taken there got frozen and could not stand the climate, and the experiment has not been repeated.

Mr Johnson MP addressing federal Parliament, 23 September 1908

4

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From just before Federation in 1901 until a final choice of a federal capital site was made late in 1908, Australia experienced a ‘Battle of the Sites’ as the supporters and opponents of proposed places exaggerated those competing places’ vices and virtues. We know that truth is a casualty of war (the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, 525 BC-456 BC, seems to have been the first of many to point this out) and we find, entertainingly, truth taking quite a bruising in the bloodless ‘Battle of the Sites.’ Here we look at the sometimes outrageous ways in which Dalgety, a serious contender and very nearly the final choice, was condemned and recommended during the ‘Battle.’

Dalgety RidiculedDalgety usually provoked far stronger emotions in its critics than Canberra provoked in its, Canberra’s, rubbishers. Dalgety is, one notices when one visits that literally forsaken place (forsaken for the Canberra site) today, a visually and meteorologically dramatic place likely to polarise opinions of it. MP Mr Sinclair was from balmy Queensland and the thought of serving in a Parliament in chilly Dalgety appalled him. He’d seen the region’s alarmingly ‘stunted’ timber, contorted and deformed by adaptations to the freezing gales so that ‘Any tree which had the temerity to grow fairly high had been bent over [by the wind] till its top reached the ground …’39 Sinclair was one of several visitors who found the place’s prairie-spoiling sprinklings of granite boulders unappealing and ugly. He thought they’d make it ‘almost impossible to beautify the site’, although they could be used for the ‘headstones’ of Parliamentarians killed by the cold.40 ‘Queenslanders look at these matters more closely than do others because they come from a warm climate and find that of Melbourne [where federal Parliament was meeting] trying enough to say nothing of a wind-swept desert such as is Dalgety … Every Parliamentary party that has gone there [Dalgety] has had the same experience. All have chanced to strike a blizzard.’ Mr Sinclair even accused that the site’s abundance of water, its greatest and for some its only virtue, was nullified by the fact that it was bound to be ‘so highly charged with magnesia or alum as to

be unfit for domestic purposes …’41

During the same debate MHR Sir William Lyne reminisced with horror that one of his parliamentary friends ‘was killed by the cold of Melbourne when attending to his parliamentary duties’ and so how anyone ‘can vote for a place [Dalgety] where the climate is twice as cold as Melbourne, I cannot understand. If we go to Dalgety … this outlandish, freezing place … the climate will kill half the older men …’42

One witty critic of Dalgety was MP and future Prime Minister Billy Hughes. He visited Dalgety during the site-inspection Parliamentary ‘picnic’ of May 1902 and, hating it, was often scathing about it in Parliament. He later wrote up some of his (horrified) impressions of Dalgety in his funny and sarcastic and fiction-enriched memoir Policies and Potenates (1950). Hughes froze at Dalgety and his mood there wasn’t helped by being poured what he claimed was a very Dalgetyesque cold bath in the hotel. He dipped a toe in the Snowy River and confirmed a shocked friend’s impression that it was ‘liquid ice’.43

Elsewhere, embellishing this story, he claimed to have actually swum in the Snowy on that day and, in a reference to the notorious impact swimming in cold water has on his sex, said he’d never been ‘the same man’ since. Hughes never forgave Dalgety and sniped at it relentlessly. During one parliamentary debate he conceded that, yes, Dalgety did get a favourable mention in the brochure, New South Wales Picturesque Resorts. And yet, he pointed out, the brochure only mentioned return fares to Dalgety, because it was unimaginable that anyone would go to appalling Dalgety to stay.44

MP Mr Foster testified that, really, one would have to be of some phenomenally hardy race

WM ‘Billy’ H

ughes



to find bitter Dalgety bearable (‘Men who can wear kilts in a climate like Scotland would no doubt, think Dalgety quite hot’) but that he, personally, wasn’t Dalgety material: ‘I experienced a blizzard at Dalgety and when I was asked whether I could see the beautiful, snow-capped peaks in the distance I replied that I could not: if I opened my eyes I should be blinded by the wind’.45

There were some especially imaginative criticisms made of Dalgety. MHR Mr Carr told Parliament that an authoritative amateur seismologist, a clergyman, had made a ‘special study of seismic disturbances’ in New South Wales. It showed that, while there were never any quakes at Lyndhurst (Mr Carr’s choice of site), there had been ‘five in recent years’ in the rough general neighbourhood of Dalgety. This raised the spectre that an earthquake there ‘might do a million pounds’ damage in one night’ to the ‘ornamental buildings’ of a federal capital built on so shaky a spot.46

Folkloric accounts of Dalgety’s storms of dust were a recurring spectre in the speeches of the place’s critics. Senator McColl told Parliament that ‘When I visited the place, the complaints made to me about the dust were heartrending’.47 Senator Colonel Foxton said that, since in Dalgety ‘the dust flies in clouds, such as we see in [Melbourne’s] St Kilda road’, a city built at Dalgety would present deadly traffic hazards.48

One persistent anti-Dalgety theme was that no agriculture or even gardening would be possible there because the soil had all been blown away, as dust. Senator McColl (accusing that Dalgety’s winter lasted for more than six months so that requiring anyone to work and live in a federal city there would be to sentence them to ‘martyrdom’) urged that ‘We want an Australian not a Siberian capital’. And he thought that in any case even terrible Siberia was a choicer spot than Dalgety because at least Siberia had some arable soil, while all of Dalgety’s had

been blown away, as dust, ‘by the continuous high winds’.49

On the same theme, a Richard Teece in the Daily Telegraph adjudicated that the Dalgety region was so barren, windswept and soil-bereft that the wind overturned mail coaches and that if anyone there ever managed the miracle of ‘the local growth of [so much as] a cabbage’, that feat ‘would be a curiosity’. And what was more, in the Dalgety region ‘Everywhere there is a plague of flies’. 50

Perhaps the most unkind accusation made against the Dalgety site was that even some of those who spoke up for it and voted for it despised it, really, believing it was so ghastly that when it came to the crunch of going there or staying in comfortable Melbourne the shuddering Parliament wouldn’t be able to bring itself to go. ‘Don’t you realise’, some federal Parliamentarians confided to Joseph Carruthers (Premier of New South Wales during an important passage of the ‘Battle of the Sites’), ‘that quite a lot of us deliberately voted for the most impossible site in order to destroy the possibility of having a bush capital inflicted on Australia?’ 51

Dalgety PraisedWith the exception of some of the purple-prosed pro-Dalgety sentiments of the Bulletin, the considerable general support for Dalgety was usually far more temperate and less hyperbolic than the condemnation of it. Some of its

unwavering supporters, including the very eloquence-capable Alfred Deakin who

was Prime Minister for much of the duration of the ‘Battle of the Sites’, never seemed able to wax lyrical about it.

But some did wax lyrical, albeit usually about the Snowy River, the Dalgety site’s great virtue. ‘I wish to go to the civilisation of

Monaro’, Dalgety convert Senator Stewart pleaded (for,

despairing, he knew even as he spoke that what he called ‘God-James Hiers McColl



forgotten’ Yass-Canberra seemed likely to get the federal capital guernsey), ‘with the Snowy River pouring down its millions, and tens of millions, and billions of gallons of water every day; to that bright, crisp atmosphere, which would be almost like wine in the veins of a man, infusing vigour into him, and making him a new creature in the enjoyment of a new heaven and a new earth’.52

Dalgety didn’t deeply endear itself to many, but was thought to have some important virtues as a site. Of these the presence of the reliable, drought-proof, snow-fed Snowy River was the greatest – while equidistance between Sydney and Melbourne was another. Sometimes Dalgety’s coldness was offered as a virtue since, after all, the most dynamic and civilised of peoples (like the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons) had been generated in icy places.53

Dalgety’s most passionate, most exaggeration-prone champion was Sydney’s Bulletin magazine. The Bulletin, always fiercely nationalistic, looked at a bigger picture and fought the pettiness and parochialism of the Sydney politicians and press anxious for a site, like Canberra, as close to Sydney and as far away from Melbourne as possible. And so the Bulletin defamed Canberra as a desert place with no real rivers at all and championed the Dalgety site as a potential paradise served by the Snowy’s heaven-sent waters. The Bulletin not only raved about the Snowy in torrents of many thousands of words of purple prose but also raved about

it pictorially, publishing photographs of the river at its spectacular, waterfall-enriched best somewhere above Dalgety, and then at its Nile-like most majestic, flowing under Dalgety’s really rather impressive bridge. 54

The sheer size and height of the bridge, the Bulletin claimed, was a testimony to the Snowy’s wide, constant quality. ‘The Snowy is 300 miles long, 180 miles of its curly, whirly length being in New South Wales’, the Bulletin marvelled. ‘It carries a water supply large enough for Sydney and Melbourne combined … and the river, because it is fed by the eternal snows of the biggest mountain range in Australia, runs all the time along its whole course …’55

The Bulletin even praised the tiny hamlet at Dalgety. ‘Dalgety itself is something of a live town, and quite unlike Canberra. The local hotels greet the traveller with an inquiry as to whether he’d like a hot bath, and after he has got over his amazement – there being no such luxury at Canberra – he says he would’.56

After the battle for Dalgety had been lost, the Bulletin still couldn’t quite forgive and let go. New South Wales suffered baking weather in the summer of 1908/1909 and the weekly published, on its cover, a cartoon of Sir William Lyne, the scourge of the Dalgety site, sitting with his feet in the Snowy at Dalgety and rejoicing: ‘Thank heaven there’s still one habitable place in NSW’.57

Perhaps the most flattering pictorial advertisement for the Dalgety site is Lionel Lindsay’s April 1908 fantasy-illustration, The Future Australian Capital On The Snowy. In this idyllic vision, an ornate city of grand buildings is arranged beside a gorgeous ornamental lake made from the Snowy’s ample waters on which (on an improbably balmy and gently breezy day, given Dalgety’s reputation as a gale-buffeted Siberia) white-sailed yachts bob and a gentleman rows a boat decorated with his sweetheart, who is sporting a girly parasol. In the far distance an idealised and artfully reshaped Mount Kosciuszko (for in fact the real Kosciuszko is a dull, mound-shaped thing) is flatteringly upholstered with snow. 58

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An Unwholesome Place’ or ‘This Magnificent Locality’ ?

The Canberra Federal Capital Site in Ridicule and Praise

A city at Canberra, dependent on a mere pencil streak of water … would be an unwholesome place with unflushed drains, and typhoid germs, and parched gardens and dried-up parks … a dreary, hopeless little town on a dry plain.

Bulletin, 6 February 1908

5


From just before Federation in 1901 until

a federal capital site was at last chosen late

in 1908, Australia experienced a ‘Battle of

the Sites’ as partisans debated, exaggerating

shamelessly and colourfully, the alleged

qualities and the alleged horrors of competing

sites. The Canberra site, of course the one

eventually chosen (and turning out to be quite

a wholesome and sanitary metropolis after all),

was wildly deplored and wildly recommended

during the ‘Battle.’

The Canberra Site DeploredOf the Canberra site’s critics the most relentless,

most exciting, most hyperbolic, most careless

with the truth was the Sydney weekly, the

Bulletin. The Bulletin’s choice was Dalgety and,

as the Canberra site began to loom as a powerful

contender, the Bulletin began to rage against

Canberra and to rave about Dalgety. As well as

tens of thousands of words of purple prose, the

weekly made shameless use of photographs and

cartoons. The Bulletin was a dirty fighter for its

cause but its proprietors did believe, passionately

and sincerely, that it would be parochial and

wicked to allow Sydney wheelers and dealers to

win the federal capital city as a kind of suburb

of Sydney. Canberra was too close to Sydney

while Dalgety, almost halfway between already

‘absurdly bloated’ Sydney and Melbourne, and

in the wide open spaces that the new nation

really should be settling, was just the spacious,

bipartisan place for a truly national city one day

of a million souls.

Meanwhile, the Bulletin lamented, ‘Part of the service which Sydney daily newspapers and Sydney dreary politicians seek to do for their State is always to represent it [when arguing for a federal capital site as close to Sydney as possible] as a cranky infant howling for all the toys and all the sweets in the nursery, and raising a law point when another State ventures to even look at its picture book’.59

For the Bulletin, the Dalgety site’s greatest

virtue was the mighty, Nile-like, never-failing

Snowy River while the dry, desert-like Canberra

site, by contrast, would be dependent on the

Cotter River —which the weekly said wasn’t

a river at all but only a ‘pencil streak of water’

and at best ‘a creek’. ‘[The] Snowy has always

been called a river – never a mere creek’, the

Bulletin preached. ‘It is to be found, with the

designation of a river, on any ordinary map of

New South Wales … while the Cotter can’t be

traced even on the plans of the New South Wales

Lands Department’, even if after some scarce

and unlikely rain it becomes ‘a baby torrent’

for a little while and ‘it brings down manure,

deceased cow and other carrion’.60

As well as thousands of words about the

wonders of the Snowy River and the horrors of

the capricious, polluted trickle of the Cotter, the

Bulletin used artfully selected photographs of

both rivers, the Snowy at its most fabulous and

the Cotter at its most pitiful, and published them

side by side on the same page and with captions

as biased as the pictures. Under one photograph

of the ‘Cotter Creek’ readers were asked to notice

how ‘the water supply, it will be noticed, is

mostly boulders and fallen trees, yet [New South

Wales] Premier Wade alleges it is equal to the

supply of Sydney’.61

Harping on the theme of the Canberra site

being impossibly desiccated, the Bulletin ran

a nightmarish full-page cartoon, The Vision of

State Premier Wade of NSW, showing Canberra,

the federal capital, as a god-forsaken camp

in a howling wilderness of ringbarked trees

and dependent for all its water on a tiny ‘State

Waterhole’ forlorn locals had to visit with

their buckets.62 And the pugnacious weekly

also argued that it was a proof of the Canberra

site’s awfulness that hardly anyone lived there:

‘Dalgety itself is something of a live town

and quite unlike Canberra …’ It published a

photograph of two sheep standing in front of a

shack and captioned the picture ‘Canberra’, with

the explanation: ‘This represents the business

centre of Canberra (NSW) and some of the

principal inhabitants’.63

The Canberra site had lots of critics in federal

Parliament in Melbourne, some of them no

doubt somewhat Bulletin-influenced, since many


members never saw the site for themselves.

Senator Stewart, a pro-Dalgety man horrified

by the likelihood (by the time he spoke late

in 1908) that Yass-Canberra was going to

be chosen, wondered: ‘What crime have we

committed that we should be exiled to the

unknown regions of Yass-Canberra?’ He’d heard

it was ‘an arid desert bleached with the bones

of animals that have died of thirst’ and that it

was so dry and arid that the site ‘would not

feed a grasshopper’, which made one wonder

‘How can it be expected to feed Members

of Parliament who are possessed of robust

appetites?’ 64

C. A. Jefferies (although, sent there by someone

he called his ‘boss’ at the anti-Canberra

Bulletin, not a really objective reporter) found

Canberra nastily smoky because of bushfires

and pestilential with rabbits and with ‘a cloud

of grasshoppers’.65 Today’s Canberrans, living in

one of the most ornithologically-blessed places

on earth (the ACT has more than two hundred

bird species) can be sure that Jefferies was a

fibber because he even reported, as a proof of

the place’s alleged sterility, a depressing absence

of birdlife.

The Canberra Site PraisedPurple prose on behalf of a Canberra site

seldom got as purple as it did in a 1903

pamphlet by William Farrer, the respected

wheat experimentalist. Farrer believed that the

move from Britain to the Queanbeyan-Canberra

region, with its wonders of climate and soils,

had banished his tuberculosis. Hence the royal

purple of his prose (if it really is his, since

there’s a suspicion it may be the work of John

Gale, another hyperbolic pro-Canberra zealot)

was probably heartfelt.

Farrer’s pamphlet, The Federal Capital –

Wanniassa As A Site (his Wanniassa is now in

the city of Canberra’s south), gushes for six

pages and, at one point, having caricatured and

defamed several other competing sites for their

homicidal extremes of climate and other failings,

turns to the gorgeous contrast Wanniassa presents:

‘Here the clear and ever-running Murrumbidgee

sparkles through our site and brightens it; here

our beautiful Alps slacken the cold blasts from

the west and south, and refresh the eye with their

ever-varying-aspects; while the balmy but fresh

and invigorating air gives such health and vigour

as to cause work to be easy, enjoyment keen,

appetite sharp and sleep certain’.66

In a letter to the Queanbeyan Age a farmer,

John Staunton of Mount Domain near Canberra,

claimed that Canberra qualified as a fine site

because it was not only a natural paradise where

to shelter from the sun or rain ‘you can get

under a treefern …’ and stand ‘with a running

brook at your feet, and watch the little fish in it,’

but a paradise easily defended against invaders

because of the ‘splendid fortifications [the

mountains] overlooking the city’. A ‘few Long

Toms [big cannons] mounted on them would

scare the enemy a bit’, he was sure.67

Vastly exaggerating Canberra’s charms and

crediting the district with one ‘magnificent’

set of waterfalls and another ‘stupendous’ one

(in truth, both are mediocre), and with ‘many

a grand cascade’ of other ‘smaller waterfalls’,

Queanbeyan identity John Gale also claimed

the site was ideal for ‘manly fieldsports’. Game

well worth shooting included (how we gasp to

read this today!) a galaxy of native bird species

including ‘the beautiful lyrebird’, while (another

gasp!) ‘the wombat has its haunts hereabouts’.68

William Farrer, recognised on the old $2 bill for his pioneering work with wheat cultivation in Australia. Farrer took a keen interest in the ‘Battle of the Sites’ and his 1903 pamphlet in praise of the Wanniassa area no doubt assisted the Canberra case.


The Cotter River at Canberra, mocked by

the Bulletin as only a ‘dribble’, had lots of

champions among the locals. Frederick

Campbell, the great grazier of Canberra, told

visiting New South Wales Commissioner

Alexander Oliver that the Canberra site was

blessed with a superabundance of water because

the splendid Cotter River (magically, and surely

like no other river in the State save for the

Snowy, ‘never affected by drought’) contained

water ‘of the purest quality’ because it had

‘a collecting lagoon at its head largely fed by

springs’, and then could hardly be contaminated

since it ran through ‘rough country’ where there

could be no cattle to foul it.69

Arthur Remington of Bywong raged against ‘the idiot’ who was writing for the Bulletin that the Canberra site didn’t have the water to sustain a city. In fact, Remington claimed (surely amazingly and implausibly), that between them the snow-fed Cotter River and another snow-fed river marked on the map as a Mountain Brook, ‘discharge annually a sufficient quantity of snow-water to supply the wants of all the humans on the continent … And mark this, you residents of less happy regions, [this supply] isn’t liable to fluctuations through drought; but the more sun the more water, and that of the purest melted snow. Think of it! Dream of it! then try to reach it, and drink of it! and you can!’ 70

Some of the most precious and plausible

praising of the Canberra site, precious and

plausible because it came from men who

weren’t creatures of the place and so had

no sentimental or real estate self-interests,

and men who moreover were members of

a notoriously cynical and hard-to-impress

profession, came from the members of the

Sydney and Melbourne press who visited

with parliamentarians in August 1906. They

all gushed for the next day’s papers about

what wonders they’d seen at Canberra. ‘This

magnificent locality … the magnificent scenery

of Canberra’, the man from the Sydney Morning

Herald, this impartial judge, twittered after his

intoxicating day embracing the site’s sparkling

air and charming panoramas.71


‘The Morning was a Glorious One’ The Canberra Federal Capital Site Turns On The Charm

6


If the gods ever did try to influence the choice

of Australia’s federal capital site, perhaps we see

their influence in the hellish weather inflicted

on some sites and the gorgeous weather given

to the others on the days those sites were being

inspected. The Canberra site was blessed with

days of crisp, sparkling, flattering weather on

two crucial occasions (one in August 1906 and

the other in August 1907) while, for example,

Albury and Wagga-Wagga seem never to

have got back into the race after the appalled

Senators who visited them in February 1902

were baked by the terrible heat and bombarded

by dust storms. By the time they’d moved on

to Goulburn in February 1902, some of the

Senators, the Goulburn Post reported, had been

so shocked by their Albury and Wagga-Wagga

experiences that they either couldn’t talk about

those experiences at all, or spoke of them ‘in a

voice shaken with emotion’.72

Chilly Dalgety, though always in the running,

was hampered by the awful impressions it made

on those who visited it on days when it was

swept by marrow-freezing winds.

But on 13 August 1906, and then again on 23 August 1907, the proposed Canberra site for the new federal capital was blessed with days of wonderfully sparkling weather to help impress the federal Parliamentarians (thirty-six of them in the 1906 ‘picnic’ and then thirteen in the 1907 one) and the several gentlemen of the press who came with them.

The visit of 13 August 1906 came the day after the tourists went to see the proposed site at Mahkoolma. Luckless Mahkoolma, near Yass, joined that list of sites that appalled their parliamentary visitors with hellish weather (sometimes blisteringly hot dust storms and sometimes marrow-freezing blizzards) on the crucial day.

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‘Canberra,1912’, oil painting by William Lister Lister, who

would go on to win the 1912-13 Commonwealth

Government competition to paint the ‘Canberra

Valley’– in oil, on an ‘8 feet by 4 feet’ canvas, ‘correct in regard to the geographical

features of the landscape’ and ‘preferably illustrating

the light at midday’.


Mahkoolma had been drenched with rains

and the visitors’ coaches sank up to their axles

and stuck in ‘vicious, tenacious mud’. ‘The

horses [pulling the coaches] handed in their

resignations’ the Bulletin reported, leaving the

mud-splattered visitors to proceed on foot.

‘Over the grey sodden landscape the party

squelched drearily, looking like nothing in the

world so much as a forlorn group of Siberian

exiles on the march’. 73

The Mahkoolma site was an easy act to follow

but in any case, on the next day, 13 August

1906, Canberra helped advertise itself with

one of those luminously blue and beautiful

midwinter days that have today’s Canberrans

imagining they’re in paradise. And breathing

paradise’s air too. Breathing Canberra’s air on

a ‘clear, frosty morning such as can be enjoyed

at these high altitudes’ was, the man from

the Daily Telegraph reported, like drinking

‘a draught of champagne … In a district of

fine landscapes, Canberra is one of the most

picturesque of spots and presented a charming

spectacle this morning under the sun from an

unclouded sky. A couple of miles out on the

drive from Queanbeyan … the visitors caught

sight from a high ridge of a beautiful panorama

– an extensive plain of pictorial country … with

the higher and rugged peaks behind, and the

rich blue of the mountain ranges still further

off, with their tops of snow …’ A little further

on and ‘Here another still more magnificent

panorama charmed the eyes of the Federal

legislators. Standing on the slope of Mount

Ainslie, they saw a beautiful valley of gently

rolling land, extending for miles and miles to

the foot of the long line of ranges enveloping

the site’. 74

The man from the Argus was similarly seduced.

He reported how it had been an ‘exhilarating

drive’ from Queanbeyan to the Canberra site

for ‘the three big coaches’ and a ‘long line

of smaller vehicles driven by residents’ who

included the mayor of Queanbeyan ‘in a light

buggy with a natty pair of ponies … The

coaches trundled away from the [Queanbeyan

railway] station, crossing first the shallow

Molonglo River, and then a streamlet, whose

surface cracked in thin sheets as the wheels

went through. Up and down timbered hills

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Lister’s first-prize winning landscape in the 1912-13 competition: ‘Federal capital site, 1913’.


the coaches rolled, to descend, after an hour’s

journey, into the pleasant plains of Canberra’.

The view from Mount Ainslie put the Argus journalist in touch with his suppressed inner poet (every newspaper journalist has one of these) and he gushed that ‘To the southward, many miles away, stretched the blue masses of the Murrumbidgee Mountains, with great piles of snow whitening their flanks. Between two of these snow-clad mountains runs the Cotter River, a perpetual stream of pure water, capable of fulfilling the requirements of a great city’. He continued: ‘The members of the party sat upon logs on the hillside and became enthusiastic about the possibilities of the site … Senator Dobson selected a pretty wooded hill as the site of his future summer residence. Mr McWilliams asked anxiously where was the nearest trout fishing and was reassured to learn that fine fighting trout could be got only a few miles away’.75 The man from the Sydney Morning Herald was similarly beguiled, and twittered about ‘the magnificent scenery of Canberra’ and ‘this magnificent locality’.76

‘The morning was a glorious one’, the partisan local paper, the Queanbeyan Age, rejoiced the next day. ‘From remarks one heard passed freely it was clear that Canberra, as a site for a large

city, had more than favourably impressed the

majority of the visitors’, with ‘many gentlemen’,

who’d previously supported other sites,

converted to the Canberra site by this glorious

day of damascene revelations about its beauty

and utility. 77

What if, one wonders, the two important

Canberra ‘picnics’ of August 1906 and 1907

had been on days of foul weather? Canberra

does have them and there would have been

winter days in 1906 and 1907 when the winds

buffeting Mount Ainslie were Dalgetyesque in

their nastiness and when sleet and rain blotted

out all beautiful panoramas. What if (horrible

thought!) they had been foggy days? Canberra

was a foggy place and, today, with an average

of forty-seven foggy days a year, Canberra is by

far the foggiest of the Australian cities. Brisbane

comes next with an average of just twenty of

them. The Commonwealth Commissioners

touring the proposed federal capital sites in

1903 asked a number of searching questions of

locals about local fogginess (locals always denied

that there was much), probably because of

enduring beliefs, in those typhoid-prone times,

that mists, fogs and miasmas were spreaders

of plague poisons. But as it was, perhaps with

(Theodore) Penleigh Boyd’s painting, ‘The

federal capital site’, 1913, which came second in

the Commonwealth Government competition— though considered by many

to be better than the Lister painting awarded first place

by the judges in July 1913.

Parli

amen

t Hou

se


pro-Canberra gods withholding the fogs,

Canberra’s weather on those two August days

which showed the spot to have the very models

of the ‘bracing climate’ and the ‘cheek-tinting

[mountain] air’ that by then almost all agreed the

federal capital site had to have. And it’s hard to

find, from all the visitors to Canberra during the

years of the ‘Battle of the Sites’, many disparaging

remarks about Canberra’s weather or any lack

of picturesqueness – while there are umpteen

shuddering references to the allegedly arctic,

windswept awfulness of Canberra’s rival Dalgety.

The Bulletin, feverishly pro-Dalgety and

sarcastically anti-Canberra, fumed on 16 April

1908 about the debating fibs that compared

‘the bleak climate of Dalgety … with the Italian

softness of Canberra’s beautiful atmosphere …

[even though] the two degree difference in the

winter temperature of the two places doesn’t

seem to justify all that whoop’.

But in the same way that the August 1906

excursion pitted two sites against one another

and blessed one, Mahkoolma, with awful

weather and the other, Canberra, with divine

weather, the August 1907 Parliamentarians

went from the loveliness of Canberra on a

lovely day on to Dalgety where, on the vital

day, the Manaro [sic] Mercury grieved, the

weather was ‘most unpropitious’. There’d been

‘a heavy wind from the north-west raising

clouds of dust’. It was cold, of course (it was

winter and snowstorms blocked out all views

of Kosciuszko), and Dalgety’s usual dryness,

combined with the drought, made the spot

look forbidding and dismal. Several who saw it

compared Dalgety’s boulder-strewn landscape,

unfavourably, to the prairie smoothness of the

Canberra site they’d just seen.79

It’s fascinating that so many Parliamentarians

who spoke about the competing sites seemed,

egocentrically, to have assessed the sites as

though they themselves were likely to be

working in a Parliament there. It takes time

to build a city and put up a Parliament (with

hindsight we know that in 1908 there was to be

a wait of almost twenty years before Canberra’s

Parliament opened for business) but lots of the

men of 1908 talk about the site as if, once it’s

chosen, they’ll be going to work there next

week. Their thoughts about the workplace’s

weather and the time it will take to travel to and

from it, have a quaint immediacy of the kind

you get in people wondering whether or not to

move house to take that job in another State.

Also helpful to the Canberra site’s cause, on those August days and during other visits, was Canberra’s church. Human fans of the Canberra site gibbered in the parliamentarians’ ears during these visits but St John’s Church, visible from Mount Ainslie, was a silent, dignified, robustly Christian supporter of the place. Its presence not only installed a built, human,

Nat

iona

l Lib

rary

of A

ustr

alia

Another striking landscape by Lister, this one a watercolour entitled: ‘The Federal Capital site, Canberra, Australia’, 1913.


reassuringly British-looking ingredient in a panorama that was otherwise mostly wildly Australian and ‘unimproved’, but also, when the parliamentary visitors went to look at it, was an advertisement for the local stone from which it was built. What’s more, because it had stood there since 1845 and was burly and heavy but with no cracks in its walls, it was a reliable proof that this was a place of firm foundations where a capital city’s great buildings could be erected. We know, because he said so in his passionate speech, that Senator James McColl’s visit to the sturdy church helped convince him that Canberra was a vastly better site than Dalgety. 80

His visit was a moment of high significance for Canberra because it would ultimately be McColl’s principled vote for Yass-Canberra (for Canberra, really) in a dramatic day in the

Senate on 6 November 1908 (he was a Victorian and would have pleased Victorians by voting for Dalgety instead) that helped give Yass-Canberra a hair’s-breadth victory over Tumut. This endorsed the House of Representatives’ selection of Yass-Canberra in the famous neck-and-neck exhaustive ballot a month earlier on 8 October 1908. St John’s, evangelising wordlessly, had helped convert Senator McColl to a point of view that made a world of difference in the ‘Battle of the Sites.’


Endnotes1 E.T. Luke, Senators Bathing In The Snowy River At

Dalgety, 1902. Album held by the National Library of Australia.

2 Argus, 20 February 1902, p.6.

3 Bernard O’Reilly, Green Mountains And Cullenbenong, Over The Hills, Smith and Paterson, Brisbane, 1949, p.248.

4 Among other publications, Neild’s chronicle appeared in The Town And Country Journal, 22 February 1902, pp.13-14.

5 Punch, 20 February 1902, p.197.



8 E.T. Luke, Senators Bathing In The Snowy River At Dalgety, 1902.

9 The man from the Telegraph, but as reported in The Manaro Mercury, 24 February 1902, p.2.

10 Neild in The Town And Country Journal, 22 February 1902, pp.13-14.


12 Alexander Oliver, A Short Review of the Contents of the Report of the Commonwealth Commissioners on Sites for the Seat of Government of the Commonwealth, William Applegate Gullick, Government Printer, Sydney, 1903, p.11.

13 Alexander Oliver, Report of the Commissioner on Sites for the Seat of Government of the Commonwealth of Australia, William Applegate Gullick, Government Printer, Sydney, 1900, p.86.

14 Royal Commission on Sites for the Seat of Government of the Commonwealth. Report of the Commissioners, Government Printer, Sydney, 1903, p. 43.

15 Argus, 14 February 1902, p.6.

16 R.V. Kearney, Tumut: The Commonwealth Capital, Federal Press Agency, Sydney, 1903[?], p.10.

17 The Federal City And The Claims Of Southern Monaro, 1900, pages unnumbered.

18 William Astley, The Federal Capital. An Argument For The Western Sites, Bathurst, 1903, p.8.

19 A. Evans, A Waterside Federal Capital, in Proceedings of the Congress of Engineers, Architects, Surveyors and Others Interested in the Building of the Federal Capital of Australia, Held in Melbourne, May 1901, J.C. Stephens (Printer), Melbourne, 1901.

20 Charles Coulter’s watercolour, An Ideal Federal City, Lake George, NSW, 1901.

21 A. Evans, A Waterside Federal Capital, p.35.

22 ibid., p.36.

23 ibid.

24 The expression is in the Blue Mountains And Jenolan Caves Illustrated Tourist Guide, 1900, reproduced on the Info Blue Mountains website.

25 R. Baxter, Bombala Herald, 17 February 1899, p.5.

26 Wagga-Wagga Express, 13 February 1902, p.2.

27 Alexander Oliver, Report, pp.10-11.

28 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, John Murray, London, 1901, p.204.

29 Ellen Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment – On The Basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropo-Geography, Constable, New York, 1911, pp.620-635.

30 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debate [CPD], 4 November 1908, p.1914.

31 CPD, 30 September 1908, p. 588.

32 Bulletin, 15 October 1903, p.8.

33 CPD, 8 October 1903, pp.5933-5934.

34 Blue Mountains And Jenolan Caves Illustrated Tourist Guide, 1900.

35 In Points Of Interest Up To Date, 1 August 1903, inserted in R.V. Kearney’s booklet, Tumut: The Commonwealth Capital.

36 Alexander Oliver, A Short Review, p.9.

37 For a distillation of these ideas, see Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct, Oxford University Press, London, 2009.

38 CPD, 23 September 1908, p.305.

39 CPD, 30 September 1908, pp.563-566.

40 Manaro [sic] Mercury, 30 August 1906, p.2.

41 CPD, 30 September 1908, pp.563-566.

42 CPD, 30 September 1908, pp.572-580.

43 W.M. Hughes, Policies and Potentates, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1950, pp.53-69.

44 CPD, 30 September 1908, p.550.

45 CPD, 24 September 1908, pp.298-302.

46 CPD, 24 September 1908, p.350.

47 CPD, 29 October 1908, pp.1667-1679.

48 CPD, 23 September 1908, pp.308-313.

49 CPD, 29 October 1908, pp.1667-1679.

50 Daily Telegraph, 19 February 1908, p.7.

51 Canberra Times, 9 May 1927, pp.3-4.

52 CPD, 4 November 1908, pp.2715-2719.

53 So, for example, Dr Maloney lectured the Parliament (CPD, 30 September 1908, p.588): ‘We are told that the weather at Dalgety is cold … [but] did not the old Vikings come from the cold countries of northern Europe?’

54 Bulletin, running a picture of the Snowy and Dalgety’s bridge on 6 February 1908, p.6, and then of the Snowy River above Dalgety, with waterfalls, on 13 February 1908, p.6.

55 Bulletin, 6 February 1908, p.6.

56 ibid.

57 The cover of the Bulletin, 7 January 1909.


58 Lone Hand, 1 April 1908, p.592.

59 Bulletin, 30 July1903, p.8.




63 Bulletin, February 27, 1908. p.6.

64 CPD, 4 December 1908, pp.2715-2719.

65 C.A. Jefferies, Bulletin, 27 February 1908, p.39.

66 William Farrer, The Federal Capital – Wanniassa As A Site, [1903?], printed at the Observer office, Queanbeyan (NSW).

67 Queanbeyan Age, 30 August 1907, p.5.

68 Dalgety Or Canberra – Which? Read at a public meeting in Queanbeyan on 24 July 1907, ‘and ordered to be printed’.

69 Alexander Oliver, Report of the Commissioner, p.86.


71 Sydney Morning Herald, 14 August 1906, p.7.

72 Goulburn Post, 17 February 1902, p.2.

73 Bulletin, 23 August 1906, p. 13.

74 Daily Telegraph, 14 August 1906, p.7.

75 Argus, 14 August 1906, p. 5.

76 Sydney Morning Herald, 14 August, 1906, p.7.


78 Bulletin, 16 April 1908, p.6.

79 Manaro Mercury, 30 August 1907, p.2

80 CPD, 29 October 1908, pp.1667-1679.

AcknowledgementsThe three authors of these booklets wish to acknowledge the generosity and commitment of the Centenary of Canberra team within the Chief Minister’s Department, ACT Government. Each of the members of this energetic team contributed in ways that were appreciated by all authors, but special mention should be made of Shirley McDonough, who was always on hand to address any special requests made of her with efficiency and cheerfulness, from start to finish of the project.

We would also like to acknowledge a number of institutions for making their collections available. The visual quality of the five booklets is primarily due to the rich resources of the National Library of Australia (NLA). Extensive use was made by the authors of material from the Pictures Branch of the NLA (Linda Groom, Sylvia Carr and staff), the Maps (Martin Woods and staff) and Newspapers sections in:

w The Community That Was (pp.1,3,4-5,6,7,8,11,12,14,15,17,18,19,20,21,22 and 27);

w Maps and Makers (pp.3,6,9,10,11,12-13,15,18,22,25,27 and 28);

w Crystal Palace to Golden Trowels (pp.1,3,5,6,9,10,11,12,14,17,22,26,27 and 28);

w Those Other Americans (pp.3,5,6,9,10,11,13,14,15,16,17,19,20,25,26,27 and 28); and

w Think of it! Dream of it! (pp.1,3,4,4-5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,16,17,18-19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 28, 29 and 32-3).

We also acknowledge the following material from other institutions: from the National Archives of Australia (Maps and Makers, pp.4-5,18-19,20-21,22 and 23; Crystal Palace to Golden Trowels, p.4 and Those Other Americans,p.6); from the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University (Crystal Palace to Golden Trowels, pp.18-19,20 and 21; Those Other Americans, p.24); from Parliament House/Art Services (The Community That Was, p.1; and Think of it! Dream of it! pp.30 and 31); from the Canberra and District Historical Society (The Community That Was, pp.13,23 and 28); from the National Capital Authority (Maps and Makers – surveyors’ chain on the cover); and from Prosper Australia (the Henry George photograph on pp.4 and 12).

We were also grateful to receive permission from the following individuals to use images from their private collections: Betsy Dunn (two paintings of H M Rolland); Patrick Barnes (building on 178 Collins Street, Melbourne); Wes and Liz Kilby (photograph of ‘Land’s End’) and Rev. Brian Maher (two images used in The Community That Was, pp.25 and 26).

Finally, we would like to personally thank our graphic designer, Mariana Rollgejser, who committed herself to this project in a manner which went well beyond her professional responsibilities. Mariana was wonderful throughout: creative, imaginative and endlessly patient. This was a team effort, and she was an invaluable member.

Ian Warden is a Canberra-based

freelance writer and researcher now, after

more than thirty years of happy wage-

slavery in newspaper journalism as a

feature-writer, columnist and reporter.

These days his freelance writing is done

for diverse publications, including the

National Library of Australia’s Magazine, to which he contributes features about

neglected events and neglected folk of

Australian history, and about unsung

treasures in the NLA’s collection of

realia (objects) as diverse as jigsaws of

the 1820s and the smashing uniform

Sir Robert Menzies wore for his 1965

investiture as Lord Warden of the Cinque

Ports and Constable of Dover Castle.

Ian WardenAbout the author…

CCanberraThink of it ! Dream it !

Other publications in this series

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n GPO Box 158, Canberra ACT 2601n t 13 22 81n e [email protected] w www.canberra100.com.au

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