Once upon a time, long before there was a city of Canberra for misguided critics (like Guy Pearce) to malign, there were Pearce-like critics of Canberra as a place for the federal capital city to be built.
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One of the critics, arguably the most distinguished of them all, was Sir John Forrest (1847-1918). Next year, when at Robyn Archer's command we must all celebrate the person our suburb is named after, the burghers of Forrest will find themselves in the interesting position of celebrating someone, Sir John, who thought this was no place for the city. On June 4, 1907, he investigated Canberra at the invitation of the NSW premier, and found it vastly inferior to Canberra's arch-rival proposed site at Dalgety. Forrest wrote a report saying so and I have a copy of it here beside me on my desk, with a small china English springer spaniel sitting on it as a paperweight.
Forrest's objections to Canberra, befitting a grand man of great achievements, were emphatic but sober. He'd been an intrepid explorer and surveyor of wild Western Australia and the photograph with today's column is of him in 1874 at his exploring and surveying peak. He'd been and still was a parliamentarian, and at the time of his exploration of the Canberra site was federal treasurer. Some opponents of the Canberra site foamed at the mouth when they discussed the wretched place, but Forrest simply insisted, mostly with a surveyor's professional detachment, that Canberra was, in his words, ''inferior'' and sometimes ''distinctly inferior'' to Dalgety.
By the time he came to inspect Canberra, he'd already inspected sites at Delegate, Bombala, Dalgety, Coolringdon, Lyndhurst, Tumut, Wyangle, Toomorroma, Gadara and Batlow. (What musical names these are! If only someone would write a catchy Battle of the Sites folk song mentioning them all.) He came to Canberra thinking Dalgety was the best site of all the many sites he'd seen.
And he left Canberra, he reported, still of that mind.
His was, the Queanbeyan and Canberra locals were to complain after his report was published in July 1907, a perfunctory whirlwind tour. He was only in the area for 10 hours and a lot of that was spent getting to and from the Cotter River. One critic said that given the route he took to and from the Cotter, he couldn't have seen much of the site, because the trees of the savannah site must have blocked his view.
Forrest was quite impressed by the Cotter on the day he saw it and called it ''a strong, clear stream, of probably a daily volume of 10 million gallons [38 million litres]'', although he thought it was probably more feeble in mid-summer. But overall, in the matter of ''abundant water supply from a perennial source'' he found ''Canberra is very inferior to Dalgety under this heading''. Dalgety, after all, was served by the mighty, relentless Snowy.
As for ''great water power for electric light and power and other applications of electricity'' he found that ''Canberra is distinctly very inferior to Dalgety under this heading'' because the surging Snowy was God's gift for the generation of electricity.
Almost no Canberrans go to Dalgety (your columnist has been there often and finds the bleak place attractively Scottish) and so can't have an informed opinion on Forrest's opinion that Canberra was ''inferior'' to Dalgety in matters of ''surrounding and adjacent scenery''.
But his conclusion that ''there is nothing of particular importance in either scenery or great natural features at Canberra'' will make Canberrans gasp. Canberra's setting seems picturesque in the extreme, and the fact that Forrest didn't think so lends support to the notion that while whirlwinding across this place, he couldn't see it for the trees.
