Voting when the polling place first opened on Saturday morning (so that the joy of putting Zed Seselja last, for his opposition to marriage equality, would last all day) it was Icelandically cold. Your columnist's numb fingers struggled to hold the AEC pencil with which I was spelling out Zed's doom.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Outdoors around the polling place the frosty paddocks and roofs bore an uncanny resemblance to Reykjavik at Christmas.
"This reminds me," I murmured (through blue lips) to my rugged-up companion as we walked home across the tundra, "that it's time I reminded readers of the part that our region's frostiness played in having the federal capital city built here."
On to that history lesson in a moment but first, and still on frostiness, to a very multicultural activity going on in our increasingly cosmopolitan city.
On recent Sunday mornings there have been serious games of cricket played on a Garran Oval that, just before the first ball is bowled, have sparkled with frost. The first time I saw this I was sure (for Garran is a place of magic and spells) I was seeing a supernatural vision.
In Australia we associate cricket with hot high summer and at ovals like Garran's blessed with leafy trees (Garran Oval is fringed with noble elms) the players gather gratefully in the shade of those trees. But here, in my vivid vision, the elms were leafless and the players were milling about beneath these skeletons.
In my vision the cricketers were all earnestly decked out in serious cricket clothing (albeit with no short sleeves showing). They had brought very professional-looking cricket bags with them. Everything was pointing to the holding of a real, first-class cricket match, albeit at this stage (about 9am) on an oval where frost still glistered wherever there was any shade.
True visions eventually go away after you've rubbed your eyes and said "Snap out of it, drongo face!" to yourself. But this time nothing worked and it emerged that eyes and mind were not deceiving me.
One of the cricketers explained to me that this was a tournament called the Independence Cup. It is played by teams formed from Canberra's cricket-mad Indian and Pakistani communities.
This year for the first time matches are being played in winter. And so it came to pass, my flannel-clad interviewee laughed, that that morning's play was being a little delayed by the frost. One is used to cricketers waiting for the rain to stop but here, in a kind of Only In Canberra situation, everyone was waiting for the outfield to thaw.
Going back last Sunday to watch a little of the match between the Punjab Lions and the Pakistan Cricket Club, still with a little frost underfoot at 10.30am, midwinter cricket seemed to make so much sense. How long a cricketless winter must seem for those who dote on the game. On Sunday the white ball shone in the flawlessly blue sky as batsmen lofted oodles of sixes and attempted sixes, for each innings is of only 25 overs so that the batting team must get a wriggle on.
Sunday morning's match, coming after the ugliness of Brexit and the upsetting news of the previous day's votings (the nation's inexplicable achievements in electing a Derryn Hinch, a Pauline Hanson to our Parliament), was somehow a soothing spectacle. Elections come and go but they are only froth and bubble. Cricket endureth for ever, and fanatics play it everywhere including (see our picture) on New Zealand's glaciers.
Frosty Saturday (polling day) and then frosty Sunday (cricket at Garran day) were exactly the sorts of "bracing" winter days our nation's early 20th century movers and shakers had in mind when they looked for a federal capital site.
The one thing that everybody thinks they know about why the nation's capital is somewhere so far from the idyllic coast and so elevated is that the nation wanted the vital city out of reach of the big, big guns of any enemy's (especially the Russian's) navy.
When I was employed to research and to write about the the matter of the choosing of the federal capital site and when I found that this dear little piece of folklore wasn't true, it worried me. It goes against a journalist's instincts to spoil stories with facts. But of course as everyone knows (and as Bill Shorten has just artfully shown with his Medicare folklore fib) people are impervious to truth and facts. My book's truths have always ricocheted off the iron-clad out-of-bombardment-range folklore, like hailstones off a Russian battleship.
The truth is though that no one at any time in the federal capital site debate ever says a word about hostile navies. Instead everyone, everywhere, is fixated on the need for the chosen site to have a "bracing" winter climate, its bracingness indicated by many frosts every winter.
It needs to be bracing, everyone agrees, because medical science shows that healthful, "cheek-tinting" mountain air helps build a sturdy race. What's more, it is being argued, history and anthropology show that bracing places (just look at northern Europe, at the Scots and better still the vivacious Vikings) have always generated the most dynamic races. By contrast tropical climes, where the dusky locals laze about in comfort waiting for mangoes to fall into their laps, never generate any geniuses.
Without our dozens of frosts this city site would never have even got into the Melbourne Cup field of "bracing" NSW spots (including similarly frost-rich Dalgety, our big rival) that the federal parliament chose from on October 8, 1908.
