Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the course of tonight’s debate on the workplace relations legislation, some have accused those on this side of the chamber of looking backwards. On the adjournment debate tonight I want to in look back 100 years. Over the next few years Canberra will enjoy a series of centenary birthdays which will culminate on 12 March 2013. Canberra Day that year will commemorate the centenary of the ‘Foundation Stones’ ceremony, when the then Governor-General’s wife, Lady Denman, not only announced the name of the new capital; she told the enthusiastic audience present on the day how to pronounce it. That day is properly reckoned as the birthday of Australia’s planned national capital city. As with any birthday, there were vital and memorable preliminary stages that preceded it, and 2008 to 2013 are undoubtedly the years to recall the exploratory action and foundational legislation of a century ago. But it would be something of an oversight to ignore a seminal speech that was delivered at a public meeting convened in Queanbeyan by the mayor of that busy town on 24 July 1907, and it is the content of that speech that I would like to address in the chamber tonight.

The speaker was John Gale, a significant figure in post-colonial Queanbeyan and, for some, the ‘Father of Canberra’. Regardless of which title we choose to use for him, what we do know with certainty is that the address given by Gale that night, entitled ‘The Federal Capital. Dalgety or Canberra: Which?’ played a pivotal and noble role in Canberra’s grand narrative. The big centenary milestones start next year, and Gale’s speech, made almost 100 years ago to the day, played a small but vital part in the Canberra story. With his background in journalism, Gale was an excellent publicist and promoter, and he knew what he wanted. The new capital of the new nation of Australia would be on his patch.

First, a little background. The search for the nation’s capital city started well before Federation in 1901. In the early 1890s, any number of Australian towns across the continent fancied their chances. The capital might have been interesting in Port Augusta, for example, or at the intersection of the borders of Queensland, the Northern Territory, New South Wales and South Australia—as some had seriously suggested—but the Federation fathers, wisely I think, decided otherwise. According to section 125 of the Constitution, the national capital should be in New South Wales, but at least 100 miles from Sydney.

Thus began, with its constitutional imprimatur, the dramatic search for sites, a process which started in earnest in 1902 and continued literally right up to the final, contentious decision in October 1908. In the 12 or so months leading up to the October decision, many Australian parliamentarians—and I understand that senators played a leading role in that respect—entrusted with the privilege of casting their vote to determine the site, had correctly assumed that the contest, and, indeed, it was a contest, was down to two sites: Dalgety and Yass-Canberra.

Western Australia’s renowned explorer/politician Sir John Forrest threw his very considerable weight behind Dalgety—so much so that he prepared a paper in the first months of 1907 which compared the two options and found strongly in Dalgety’s favour. New South Wales Premier Sir Joseph Carruthers and former Labor Prime Minister Chris Watson had emerged as public advocates for Canberra. The struggle was on in earnest.

Enter John Gale, intent on aggressively taking the influential Forrest to task and armed with an astonishing amount of technical, scientific, cultural and environmental information—and a desire to see the record put right. He knew that Yass-Canberra deserved to be the capital and he had put in many hours to establish what we would today refer to as a superb business case. This is obvious from the text of the lecture, based on a paper that Gale had prepared back in 1902 with the celebrated agrarian scientist, William Farrer, of wheat fame. Gale knew that the politicians wanted the best possible spot for the capital and he would give it to them. Land availability was no problem at all:

In the vicinity of Canberra there is enough land to supply the wants of the Capital with such necessary food products as cannot well be brought from a distance. The meat, milk, butter, grapes, apples, potatoes, and other fruits and rootcrops raised or grown in the surrounding district cannot be surpassed in any part of Australia ...

Amidst a surprising amount of careful environmental detail, Gale gives close attention to the issue of water, extolling the many advantages of the Murrumbidgee and Molonglo rivers. A ‘concrete weir’ on both rivers would:

... besides furnishing additional power for electrical purposes ... create vast reaches of impounded water within a few miles of the city itself.

Again, a vision of the city that became truer than he could have imagined. Like many of his generation, Gale understood the need for a capital to be more than the seat of government; it must also be a living, breathing heart for the community’s aesthetic and recreational wants. On this point Gale proposed Canberra as a recreational paradise for the coming citizenry. Inevitably, with the passing of a century since his views were expounded, his paradise does not quite resemble what we might see today as an ideal for a city which is a national capital. His views of the benefits of Canberra in this regard were:

Closely allied to picturesque scenery and natural objects of paramount charm and beauty, are such manly fieldsports as hunting, shooting, and fishing. Game is everywhere plentiful. Besides kangaroo, wallaroo, and wallaby of many sorts, the wombat has its haunts hereabouts—to say nothing of the ubiquitous rabbit, hare and fox. We may even include the stately deer which are already in considerable numbers on the park-like uplands fringing Lake George. Birds of game include the beautiful lyre-bird, brush and plains turkey, curlew and plover, and, in their season, snipe and quail; wild duck, teal, swan, redbill, water hen and other aquatic fowl; so that employment for the gun can also be relied upon. As for the rod, the Queanbeyan district stands an easy first ...

It is true that the natural environment still holds very special attraction for Canberrans and indeed for all Australians, but for somewhat different reasons to the ones that attracted Gale.

More contemporary in its appeal is the image of the national capital of the future, which Gale provides in the last paragraphs of the paper. He trumpets a little floridly, but without much exaggeration:

Here the clear and ever-flowing Murrumbidgee sparkles through our splendid site and brightens it; here, our stupendous 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, appetite sharp, and sleep certain.

That explains the glow in my cheeks today; it is the balmy but fresh and invigorating air of that capital that was chosen almost a century ago. Despite some imagery in his salesmanship that wanders a little with the effluxion of time, this is a picture of Canberra as true today as it was 100 years ago. The ideas in Gale’s speech have prescience and a durability that marks him out as a visionary and one who can rightly claim to be a—if not the—‘Father of Canberra’. It is a matter of record that Gale got his wish in little more than a year. The capital would be Canberra. The rest is history. With the indulgence of the Senate I propose to come back to this subject on future occasions, as other important celebrations of those centenary milestones leading up to 12 March 2013 occur.