Canberra has been green and lush for months and now we've just had these deluges of flooding, refreshing, cabbage-swelling rains. And so it's amusing to recall that during the ''Battle of the sites'' (1899-1908) opponents of Canberra as the federal capital used to call it a shrivelled wilderness.
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No city was possible here they warned. A lack of water would make it unsanitary and paradise for typhoid. Farms and gardens would be impossible. In the unlikely event of anyone here ever managing to grow a single stunted cabbage, it would be front page news.
''What crime have we committed that we should be exiled to the unknown regions of Yass-Canberra?'' the pro-Dalgety Senator James Stewart whinged to the the upper house in 1908. He said he'd heard it was ''an arid desert bleached with the bones of animals that have died of thirst''.
He'd heard it was so dry and bare that the site ''would not feed a grasshopper'' in which case ''How can it be expected to feed members of parliament who are possessed of robust appetites?''
The Canberra site's alleged Saharaesqueness was a major polemical weapon in the armoury of the passionately pro-Dalgety forces. They alleged that Canberra had only the capricious trickle of the Cotter Creek (opponents refused to call it a river). By contrast at Dalgety there was the mighty, wide, curly-wurly and reliably snow-fed Snowy River. A great city built beside the Snowy would have all the water it needed for everything imaginable, from hydro-electric power to vast expanses of ornamental lakes. A billion big, leafy cabbages would grow there.
In this vexed matter of the federal capital site Sydney's effervescent weekly The Bulletin was passionately pro-Dalgety and pathologically anti-Canberra. Water, Canberra's alleged lack of it and Dalgety's wonderful superabundance of it, was a pillar of The Bulletin case.
The Bulletin didn't fight fair in all this. Truth was never allowed to interfere with its coverage. It published unflattering pictures of a feeble Cotter Creek at its worst, juxtaposed with pictures of the Snowy at Dalgety that made it look as substantial as the Danube in Vienna.
In February 1908 the The Bulletin became especially shrill and toey, sure that a federal capital site vote was pending (and it was, Yass-Canberra was to beat Dalgety by a nose later that year). It despatched a special writer and photographer C. A. Jefferies out into the wilderness of NSW to go first to the Canberra site and then on the Dalgety site to pretend to make an objective comparison of them.
His outrageously biased essay is wonderfully readable. The Canberra site is described as an ''empty, drought-stricken plain'' with surroundings hard to see through ''the shimmering heat and haze''. The awful place as described by him had no visible civilisation at all save for ''in the distance, a church [that] lifted its spire into the smoke-laden atmosphere''. This was St John's church, now nestling in the suburb of Reid. Jefferies went, with defamation and hyperbole on his mind, to the crucial Cotter Creek. He reported that it was such a meek dribble of a thing that he was able to stand his most expensive camera on its tripod at the most energetic point of its ''torrent'' without there being the slightest risk of it being bowled over and damaged. His photograph of his unthreatened camera (of course as well as the Cotter not being at its best in high, droughty summer, we can be sure Jefferies chose the most unflattering stretch of the river) was published with the essay.
Then Jefferies, this fibber, went on to Dalgety. There, rejoicing, he reported a well-watered alpine paradise where everyone was so radiantly happy, healthy and handsome (and especially the apple-cheeked Dalgety gel who greeted him at his hotel and offered to run him a bath) that you could tell that here was exactly the bracing climate to stimulate federal legislators and to generate a robust race of Australians.
Dalgety and the Snowy's first exposure to judgment as a possible site came in the summer of 1902 and is the subject of one of the most famous of all Australian photographs. A party of site-seeking senators went out into stinking-hot, drought-bedraggled rural NSW and had been to some ghastly, oven-like places before at last they got to Dalgety. There they were glad to cool off in the Snowy and E. T. Luke took a legendary photograph of some of them posed in the river.
But they're not frolicking and if they look a little uncomfortable it may be because even in summer the Snowy's waters, of course made of the snow on nearby peaks, are scrotum-shrivellingly bracing. The Snowy was described by one of the inspecting politicians as ''liquid ice''.
