Day 249 - Australian Capital Territory

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Up before dawn today for a full-on itinerary. We were on our way without breakfast and took 2 and a bit hours to reach Canberra. At some points Ed was doing almost 55mph (remember, van’s condition dictates a max of 50mph) on account of grumbling stomachs. Crazy. Canberra is the capital of Australia, for those of you who don’t know, but most people outside of Oz have never even heard of it. It’s a little like Washington DC in America, in the sense that it’s on land that’s independent of the states and is much less famous than Sydney (New York). It’s also perceived as boring. But we had a really, really good time here. The town’s layout was planned and has the most bizarre and un-navigable concentric circles (roundabouts within roundabouts in Gemma’s more helpful words) combined with one-way systems. Still, we found the places we wanted to go to, the National Museum of Australia and the War Memorial. The museum was very modern, creative and innovative, a little weird in places but somewhere we’d give a hearty recommendation to. As a side bonus they were hosting a press conference that included ‘10 Living (Ed and Gemma say - thankfully!) Miss Australias’. They were all lending support to a new exhibition about the Miss Australia contest, looking very nice in their sashes. And also impossibly young - each sash said in which year they’d won and a quick bit of mental arithmetic, combined with the assumption that you can’t become Miss Australia before you are born, means cosmetic surgery or a diet of antioxidants were on display.

Another thing we noticed concerns the Australian identity. It seems that up until a few years ago, maybe the 1980s, Australia was a bit self-conscious of its convict origins. Nowadays they have changed and they - quite rightly - embrace it as an important part of where a lot of them came from. But the form that this embracing takes is fascinating, if a little subtle. There is a very clear emphasis both in the museum and in the media on crimes that the British would deport someone for and the very trivial nature of a lot of these. Obviously plenty of the deported convicts were murderers and such like, but these don’t get much attention and instead there is a whole list of crimes that are specifically deportable offences. Our personal favourite, by a very long way, is ‘Impersonating an Egyptian’! Classic, you could not make this stuff up, even if we tried.

Next we visited the well laid out and informative War Memorial Museum, with detailed model depictions in the history of Australia’s wars, some light displays that would have been much better if Kirsty had got her hands on them and also the view up to Parliament House on Capital Hill was impressive as well. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was incredible, a mosaic covered room - very modern but amazingly powerful.

We got ourselves over to the Capital Hill area and then took twice as long to get ourselves off. We didn’t dare get out of the van, we might have lost it, and we thought we might get stuck on one of the infinite roundabouts, like The Simpsons family in their rented Mini on their visit to London. And then we waved farewell to Canberra, very fond of the place.

Our plan for the rest of the day was to drive until we were on the outskirts of Sydney. Local radio mentioned that Melbourne had just been hit by a small earthquake, which we were annoyed to have missed, and continued that Sydney was likely to experience the worst thunderstorm in a while that night. Not a great prospect in our leaking van. We stopped in a town called Minto but struggled to find anywhere decent to stay. In the end we decided McDonalds car park was best on account of the ‘facilities’. The life of luxury that we live really is astounding sometimes.

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