My fellow Canberrans, do you feel that ours is an optimistic city? Does the mood of our metropolis encourage you to expect that things are going to get better and better? Alternatively, is there something, anything about this Canberra that stokes gloom in your brooding bosom?
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
On to these gigantic questions about The Meaning Of (Canberra) Life in just a moment.
An optimist by nature, I always expect to hear something stimulating whenever I tune in to ABC Radio National. It boasts that it is The Ideas Network. And sure enough one evening this week and on the Health Report I listened enthralled to Dr Eric Kim of the Harvard School of Public Health. He was discussing a huge study he has led (investigating 70,000 souls) into Optimism.
Thinking readers (this boutique column's main clientele) can listen to the podcast of his stimulating natter, Do Optimists Live Longer?
Dr Kim's wide-ranging discussion of optimism and of pessimism, of what they are, where they come from, of their ramifications for our health, has left me thinking about Canberra and optimism. Is Canberra an optimistic or a pessimistic city?
Dr Kim fancies that perhaps 25 per cent of our disposition to be optimistic or to be a doom monger is genetically determined. The rest of that disposition is stoked by all sorts of things about our lives, about factors of good or poor luck in how we are raised and in how we live. And, by implication, of where we live.
Stimulated by Dr Kim and wondering where my general optimism comes from it occurs to me that I may owe some of my bright-side-of-life instincts to our dear metropolis.
Dr Kim's working definition of optimists is that "they expect that things will be better". And I realise that for some 10 years now I have had the everyday expectation that Canberra will go on getting better and better.
Dr Kim talks about "well-validated optimism" and generally the expectation that Canberra will get better and better really is validated by what happens here. Well-travelled, I have strong ideas about what makes for a fine city. I am always looking for signs that Canberra is becoming more metrosexy and cosmopolitan. I look for (and increasingly find) Canberra becoming a little Chicagoan here, a little Glaswegian there, a lot more Melburnian and a fraction more Oslo-like every day.
How awful it must be to be one of those miserabilist Canberrans, over-represented in the Letters pages of this paper, who loved Canberra the way it was in the 1980s (when it was a kind of Armidale) and who finds every new development and enlargement of Canberra an atrocity.
Last Sunday, and before Dr Kim had set me on this track, my Canberra-stoked optimistic nature shone forth. There was a fine busker at work at the Woden Farmer's Market. His heartfelt version of Dirty Old Town was terrific. A patron of the arts, I plonked some doubloons into his open guitar case, enthusing to my companion "Do you notice how the standard of Canberra busking is getting better all the time? You can tell a lot about a city from its busking. I bet it's awful in Barnaby Joyce's Armidale. There it'll be all Slim Dusty impersonators."
An optimist herself, my companion (who had even allowed this fine busking to distract her from her core mission of buying organically-grown aubergines) enthusiastically agreed.
Perhaps one needs to have lived in Canberra for a long time to know and to feel how in recent years Canberra has begun to throb. For far too long this was a dull place (perhaps like today's Armidale that Barnaby Joyce wants to send us all to) that barely had a pulse. One lived here more out of habit (and a masturbatory habit at that) and only because it was a comfortable place in which to snooze one's superannuated life away.
Today the city has an effervescence about it. This is a bigger, taller city now and the optimist, beetling through the bare new suburbs, keenly imagines the day when all the trees have grown. Then Moncrieff and Coombs, getting better every day, will be as leafy and parrot-rich and as socially pulsating as the suburbs of today's olde Canberra.
Dr Kim emphasises that the average optimist is not some sort of tiresome happy-clappy clown who chortles and sings all day. It is just that, over time, he or she is more likely to believe that things will get better and better.
Yes, this general optimist, your columnist, has as well a talent for melancholy. Misery can be delicious, in moderation. Shakespeare's comedies don't interest me but his tragedies seem moving, gripping and true to the life we all have to live in this vale of tears.
My spiritual home is a grim, grey, shipwreck-littered stretch of the English coast battered by the moody North Sea. But I'm sure that when we are optimistic in Canberra the sheer gaiety of Canberra's sunniness and brilliantly clear sub-alpine air and light has something to do with it. To live in so meteorologically lovely a place is cheering, like living in a home with gaily-patterned wallpaper.
