A spectacular cake in the shape of a giant globe of the world competed with Tony Abbott, for our attention, as standing next to it the prime minister performed Friday’s official opening of the elegant and polished new Canberra Airport terminal.
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Other visual competition for our leader came from Andrew Rogers’ towering (7.5 metres tall) sculpture Unfurled which, beside the rostrum, unfurled itself up towards the ceiling like a tornado’s spiralling column of air.
It is typical of the super new terminal (between 2009-2013 $480 million has been spent on it) of which the prime minister spoke glowingly, that it should have an artwork as grand as Unfurled.
The eyes of the audience of about 250 champagne-sipping souls (dozens of them those McMovers and McShakers and McOfficials in jet-black suits) may have wandered to these attractions but everyone listened attentively to the prime minister.
Speaking under the terminal’s’s ‘‘Gosh!’’-provoking atrium and gesturing at the spacious splendour all about him the prime minister rejoiced at ‘‘this splendid, splendid new terminal’’.
‘‘In the 19th century it was the grandeur of railway terminals which spoke of the confidence and pride of the city and country where you were.
''Today it is the grandeur of the airport terminals which speaks of the pride and confidence of the city and the country where it is, and this is truly a proud and beautiful terminal.’’
He is of course, as a veteran federal pollie, a veteran patron of the blush-makingly awful airport terminals the city has suffered for far too long (some of us, looking about us on Friday, agreed that this is the first time Canberra has ever had an airport terminal that looks like an airport terminal rather than, say, a run-down suburban boarding kennel).
‘‘I can remember,’’ the prime minister reminisced, ‘‘flying into Canberra back in the 1960s.’’
‘‘It was a small airport with an almost non-existent terminal. And I can remember the white Meccano terminal that was built in the 1980s.
''At the time I thought that was the last word in opulence and luxury. But thank God that’s gone, to be replaced by this truly magnificent terminal which is part of an airport district which is an epicentre of the economy of the Capital Territory.''
Then, for the official opening moment, as the prime minister pushed a button and as a string quartet (hitherto playing Mozart) struck up a Mozartean-sounding version of From Little Things Big Things Grow, a vast white curtain came crumpling down, operatically, to reveal a gigantic window/wall on the other side of which, in front of a parked Qantas juggernaut, two fire engines used their hoses to create a terrific arc of water.
Then the prime minister and Canberra Airport owner Terry Snow posed with (but for reasons unexplained didn’t cut) the aforementioned cake.
Created by Jo Binkin of Eat Sleep Dream Cakes (she was there, expecting her artwork to disappear before our very eyes while Andrew Rogers’ artwork Unfurled promises to last 100 years) it has continents of icing sugar and red lines of icing sugar indicating Canberra as a centre of world aviation with red icing sugar routes reaching out across the world.
Terry Snow, introducing the prime minister with a speech that was a hymn of praise to private enterprise, had rather bashed the prime ministerial ear about how he, Snow, would appreciate a federal government that helped enable Canberra Airport to become really, truly international, and especially linked to Asia.
In his speech Mr Abbott said that he had got Snow’s message and had heeded it, and echoed someone’s famous promise that ‘‘the difficult we’ll do immediately, while the impossible will take a little longer but we’ll do our best.’’