Canberra, Federation's grand experiment in urban development, is a city of the lost, criss-crossed by roads to nowhere and hollow at its core, University of Canberra adjunct professor of architecture Peter Tonkin says.
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The practising architect and artist delivered a ''very personal reflection'' on his ''long-standing love/hate relationship with the nation's city beautiful'' at Tuesday's Capitals Alliance seminar at the university.
He said the impulsive resolution to create a capital from the ground up had been as adventurous and optimistic as the British government's decision to dispatch the First Fleet to the ends of the earth in 1787, with the final result just as unpredictable.
''Australians are suspicious of Canberra,'' he said. ''They confuse the government that sits here with Canberra's life as a city. We are jealous of its subsidies, teased by its incompleteness, confusing roads and acres of grass.''
Only in recent times has the city begun to come of age, a process Tonkin welcomes and one in which he has participated.
''I love Canberra,'' he said, ''It's not Melbourne, it's not Sydney but a whole separate urban setting.''
Part of that separateness comes from an idiosyncratic individuality that locals come to love but which can drive visitors to despair. The road system is the classic example.
''In Melbourne and Sydney, roads go places,'' Tonkin said. ''They go from A to B.
''In Canberra, the roads go from A past B and then you have to backtrack to get to B. Once you get used to it, it is amusing. But speak to years of visitors, they find it anything but.''
While Tonkin, who has worked on projects as diverse as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the National Arboretum, believes the city is finally starting to develop a patina and sense of place he says the absence of a commercial and civic hub shrieks a lack of confidence.
''[Canberra's] centre has been planned for an indeterminate future, a time when there will be four times the number of federal buildings, finally a 'town hall', a public transport system and a big civic market,'' he said.
''We have been too afraid to fill up this centre; too lacking in confidence to commit to the centre.
''Instead, we have built second-rate boxes far away, where the planners, whoever they are, can pretend they don't matter.''
Some of the city's stark emptiness could be viewed as a triumph of monumental infrastructure investment over the needs of the people who lived here.
''You shouldn't have to take a freeway to get from one suburb to another. It is a case of too much funding and not enough population. And there are still traffic jams.''
Such contradictions reflect the dichotomy of a national capital that doubles as a home town.
''On the one hand, there is Canberra's role as Australia's front yard,'' Tonkin said.
''It is tidy, public, image-driven and often unused. On the other, it is home to 350,000 Australians engaged in a flourishing economy, one of our fastest-growing communities and our only large inland city.''
