Nicholas Brown feels his way into these competing narratives with his own connection to the place: ‘Canberra – and what came before it – is in my family’s bones.’ He tells of his father the public servant, his mother the typist, and his convict ancestor, James Brown, who was killed by a falling tree on the Limestone Plains in 1861. His personal experiences, like those of other locals, establish the scale at which the city has meaning. But with A History of Canberra, Brown seeks to understand the capital by a different measure. He is interested in the historical and environmental dynamics of the place, how it evolved over time, and what it tells us about the broader Australian experience. This is a beautifully written, and impressively concise, general history of the nation’s capital. It is also a search to understand the enduring enigma of Canberra.

To guide this search, Brown calls on themes of community, government, and environment to act as ‘points of reference’ in his chronological narrative. These themes are woven so seamlessly into the fabric of his history that it comes as a surprise when they are explicitly invoked towards the end of each chapter. Each emphasises a distinct aspect of the city; combined, they paint a compelling portrait of Canberra, from Tuggeranong and Capital Hill to Floriade and Summernats.

It is an earnest undertaking. Brown eschews mockery of Canberra – that favourite national pastime – and instead historicises this phenomenon in interesting and illuminating ways. We can learn something from the way that the capital has been ridiculed. Even the derision of Canberra as a ‘good sheep station spoiled,’ reflects Brown, ‘allows that it first had to be a sheep station, and a good one at that.’ The changing tones of condescension tell of a city assuming its role in the national imagination, evolving from an abstract ideal into a place of unique character and consequence.

Axis from the Australian War Memorial to Parliament House from Mt Ainslie Canberra (photograph by Peta Holmes)

The narrative moves swiftly through the rifting, crushing, carving processes that formed the mountains and valleys of the Limestone Plains to the swarms of rabbits and hares that arrived in the 1800s, leaving their own enduring mark on the landscape. Humans enter the history twenty-one thousand years ago, and then, all too quickly, we are swept up in stories of the squatters, pastoralists, and bushrangers who moved into the region and steadily displaced and dispossessed the Ngunawal, Ngarigu, and Ngambri people.

Brown follows the capital from idea through to protracted realisation, from the official ‘picnics’ conducted to choose the site location to the competitions held to decide the city’s name and design. We can be grateful our federal parliament doesn’t convene in ‘Shakespeare’, ‘Democratia’, or ‘Empire City’. The construction of Canberra proceeded in fitful bursts followed by long periods of stagnation. When the architect Walter Burley Griffin died in 1937, little had been achieved of his original design, apart from a few main roads cut by rabbit gates and small clusters of houses and shops on either side of the Molonglo River. The ‘temporary’ prime minister’s residence, which remains in use today, embodies the piecemeal development of the city, driven in equal part by deals and ideals.

Brown deftly balances familiar events with flourishes of local detail that allow the city and its histories to unfold in fresh and lively ways. His close attention to demographic shifts, town-planning initiatives, and public-service reforms allow us to glimpse the pulse of a rapidly changing city. He explores how an administrator’s preference for bungalows, ‘nucleated and detached’, triumphed over Griffin’s proposed high-density residential precincts, which were designed to foster ‘that larger family, the neighbourhood group’. Perhaps Griffin’s original design would have gone some way to curing ‘Canberritis’: the grinding loneliness that characterised the experiences of so many early residents.

Two elements, perhaps more than any other, have come to shape the bush capital: cars and trees. Petrol shortages during World War II highlighted how much private cars – that ‘ultimate symbol of modernism’ – had defined the city and its spaces. This remains the case, as the concrete atrocity of Woden, surrounded by a ‘moat of car parks’, attests. But trees also shaped the ‘Garden City’. Horticulturalist Charles Weston is largely responsible for Canberra’s ‘planting palette’. Weston’s carefully tended trees, with their ‘decorative patterned associations and softened suburban hierarchies’, gradually impressed their personality on residents and are now celebrated from viewing points in the National Arboretum.

Canberra was ‘baptised’ in the wake of World War II. The population shifted and rapidly expanded with the coming of ‘New Australians’, while Queen Elizabeth’s 1954 visit and the defection of Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov a month later gained the capital unprecedented national attention. ‘But such ornate fragments of politics and culture,’ Brown notes, ‘hung awkwardly off Canberra’s spare frame.’ The city remained an inherently peculiar place, in which public servants and construction workers made up three-quarters of the population. But it was also, as an extended feature in a 1957 Women’s Weekly observed, becoming ‘home’.

In the 1960s Canberra had more children and trees per head than any other part of Australia – and there were also more societies. Whether it be film or music, cycling or gardening, a rich vein of local culture was forming in the capital, often around the Australian National University, and ‘a quiet revolution’ was unfolding in the quality of Australian life. This decade of optimism and agitation saw Canberra assume a greater national role, with Aboriginal leader Charles Perkins declaring in 1969, ‘If we’re not in Canberra, we’re history.’ While the city ‘still pulsed with new agencies, acronyms, programs and commitments’ in the 1970s, by the 1980s it was suffering rising unemployment and Canberra’s citizens were plunged, largely against their will, into self-government.

Perhaps inevitably, individual character sketches and evocations of place are lost in Brown’s search for patterns and societal change. But Brown has achieved an impressive feat. He has crafted a short, well-rounded history of a city that has never been lost for words. And he makes room in his narrative for rich vignettes that capture the peculiarities of Canberra: from Rosemary Dobson’s bus driver with a copy of Sartre in his pocket to Patricia Piccinini’s Skywhale, which floats luminously over the closing pages.

‘The problem with seeking the real Canberra,’ Brown reflects at the end of the book, ‘is that, for all its layered histories, the concept is itself inconsistent with its history, and its peculiar purpose. The authentic is hard to find in such a place, and harder still to use.’ A History of Canberra draws us into this city of contradictions: a place that is at once ancient and new, natural and invented, local and national – a capital that remains ‘preoccupied with its own becoming’. Brown comes to the book as an insider and he shares with the reader his deep knowledge and appreciation of the Limestone Plains. His Canberra is a ‘nurturing place’. It is not an artificial cluster of institutions and monuments with themed suburbs and a geometric streetscape; it is an old landscape, weathered and lean, embedded with stories and ideals and local experience.