I’ve got some advice for Canberra Tourism: the way you’ve been marketing the city is all wrong. You have to stop hiding from the fact that Canberra is the most boring city on earth, and actually make a VIRTUE of it. A big ask, you say? Music, as always, provides the answer.
Before you get defensive, I’ve been here long enough to know all the comebacks. Yes, the air is clean. Yes, there’s no traffic (Parkes Way excepted), and riding a bicycle here isn’t an extreme sport, like it is in Sydney or Melbourne. And it’s a great city to bring up kids.
All true, and all corollaries of being the most boring city in the world. You know it and I know it.
The key is to stop pretending the city is something it’s not, because frankly, some of the marketing ideas for Canberra have been bizarre.
Take, for example, Feel the Power of Canberra. After years of trying to separate, in the minds of other Australians, the city from the stinky Federal Government we host, we did an about face and embraced the connection.
In a former life as a public servant, I was responsible for scrambling, at short notice, to arrange the Feel the Power of Canberra slogan on ACT numberplates, just as we were about to run out of the old ‘Y’ series. Brendan Smyth, my minister, was VERY keen to get his slick new slogan on the very first plate in the new series.
The new slogan effectively said, ‘Every tax rise, every crowded emergency waiting room, every foreign military misadventure – that’s Canberra, folks! Come feel the power of the government that intrudes into every part of your miserable lives!’
It was like using Mt Druitt to sell Sydney.
The campaign had balls, for sure. Unfortunately for Canberra tourism, the only tangible effect interstate was that a couple of ACT registered cars got keyed with ‘Feel the power of THIS’ in Sydney. (And a lot of people had a good laugh.)
How does music fit into all this?
Well, one of Canberra’s greatest musical products is Steve Kilbey, best known as the singer and songwriter behind The Church. The Church, of course, is one of Australia’s great bands, still making vital music 20 years after their biggest hit, Under the Milky Way – a song regularly ranked as one of Australia’s all-time greats.
When Kilbey was in his early teens his parents moved to Canberra, and he was stuck here until he left home. He hated it.
“When I was there it was quite a rough and brutal place,” he told me in an interview. “It was Wagga Wagga.”
Kilbey left Canberra for Sydney as soon as he could and has since avoided it “like the plague”.
But here’s the thing: Canberra’s stultifying boredom was good for his music.
“Because there was absolutely nothing to do, I spent the time in a room with a record player, studying records,” Kilbey said.
“If I’d grown up in Sydney I would have been down the beach, or whatever. In Canberra you had to invent your own interior world. It focussed me.”
Now, this is significant. It’s the first time I’m aware of that a musician of some fame and talent has described Canberra’s lack of any kind of excitement as A GOOD THING. The city’s uniform dullness turns out to be something that helps, not hinders, creativity.
And it’s there in the music, if you pay attention. Remember the opening line of The Church’s very first single, Unguarded Moment?
‘So hard, finding inspiration’ - that’s us, folks! Canberra, right there!
And yet Kilbey did find inspiration, in the lack of it. From deep inside himself. So the circuses and elephants, the suns which blind the men, and those girls with cameras for eyes, can all ultimately be traced back to being bored witless in Canberra.
The wonderful Steve Appel, aka King Curly, also survived growing up in Canberra. Like Kilbey, he reckons Canberra has a distinct artistic advantage over cities like Melbourne that brim with “alleged culture”. Did it work for him? You be the judge:
Just magical.
Like many of King Curly’s songs, Family Man has a quiet desperation and an undercurrent of deep melancholy that I think is the legacy of a Canberra childhood.
Canberra songwriter Cathy Petocz, who won a Triple J songwriting competition called Flesh it Out and has just released a gorgeous debut album, taps into the same melancholy (it’s a permanent spring).
In Sport for the Lonely, Petocz sings about running across ovals at night, alone, with her eyes closed. It strikes me as a quintessentially Canberra song, about a desperate kind of joy - a defiant joy - in the face of unrelenting greyness.
I hear it as a metaphor for what people have to do in Canberra. If the most stimulating thing in your suburb – in Canberra, even - is an oval, find a way to make it interesting. And if you’re an artist, sing, paint, or write about it.
Petocz is also on song with Appel and Kilbey when it comes to Canberra’s unique and perversely positive influence on artists.
“One thing I love about it is that because there’s not a lot of interesting things happening, people have to make their own fun. If you want to see a good band, you have to make a good band,” she says.
So here it is: let’s embrace Canberra’s lack of excitement. Let’s sell this city to musicians, and artist of all kinds, as a place where they can find their own voice. Let’s be Australia’s grandparents, wagging a finger and saying, ‘In our day we entertained ourselves. In Canberra, that day is not yet past’.
I’ve got some slogan ideas:
Canberra - make your own fun
The National Capital - distraction free since 1913
Feel the malaise of Canberra
Canberra – inspirationally boring
Canberra - nowhere to go but within
Canberra - gateway to your next song
And one Steve Kilbey might like: Canberra - Wagga with a bigger lake
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