Member-only story
It’s Summer Here In Canberra, So They Say!
Canberra…the nation’s capital, a city where few builders have significantly changed their practice in a gazillion years!
We came to Canberra a gazillion years ago. My husband promised me it would only be for two years. Not sure how many times you have to multiply two in order to get to a gazillion, but I know it’s a lot.
There’s much that I hated about Canberra, the cold winters, aye, even for a Scot, but I could live with that. But the home’s architecture? Meh! Anybody can design a box!
Bearing in mind it’s the nation’s capital, you’d think they could have taken some measures to remove the said architecture out of the bowels of ‘ordinary in the extreme’. But they didn’t, and they haven’t!
We had been living in Adelaide, home of delightful bluestone houses, and after much resistance on my part, we came to Canberra and ‘traded up’ to a mid-brown box, also known as a home.
Just imagine, if you will, one of the ubiquitous little boxes that Malvina Reynolds sang about, you know, the ones made of ticky-tacky, and you have ours! It’s all we could afford because we bought in the eye of a real estate storm. A north-facing (???), crappy structure that I swear was made of pine saplings still striving…
