This is agitating Canberrans.

One wit has suggested (Letters 29 November) that Mr Joyce, known to dislike Canberra, may next move by regulation to make Armidale the federal capital city.

This reminds your columnist that once upon a time Armidale in a sense dreamed of pre-emptively taking every job that might ever occur at Canberra.

For Armidale was once in the running of the race to provide the federal capital site. Just as in recent days Joyce has spruiked the wonders of Armidale as a place worth moving to ("the NBN, excellent cafes, art galleries") in 1902 locals spruiked Armidale's virtues as a potential national capital site.

In 1902 Armidale was included in an expert investigation of several sites (including Lake George, where a kind of Australian Venice was imagined). The many-splendoured site of Canberra only seriously joined the gallop in 1906. By then Armidale's lustre had faded.

Armidale got on to early shortlists of possibilities, largely because it had what every serious contender had to have to get into the tournament in the first place. It had a "bracing" climate. Armidale, well inland and nicely elevated (just like the two eventual colossal candidates, Canberra and Dalgety) was dependably frosty in winter. Those seeking the perfect federal site were looking for an ideal somewhere, a "sanatorium" spot with healthy, "cheek-tinting air" far away from the unhealthy, typhoidy steaminess of the coast.

Every contending site's champions rolled out local worthies to testify to the investigating commissioners and politicians about the miraculous healthfulness of the district.

The local Government Medical Officer George Wigan went enthusiastically into bat for Armidale when the Federal Capital Commissioner held hearings there in January 1902. Wigan testified that his 25 years in the district had shewn him that "Armidale is one of the healthiest of places."

He'd never known a case of consumption (TB) "to arise in the district". He insisted that the neighbourhood's typhoid numbers were skewed by people arriving there from elsewhere "already in a dying condition".

The partisan sawbones praised Armidale's general meteorological coolness. The Armidale he painted sounds almost as as cheek-tintingly healthy as our Canberra.

So why didn't Armidale, according to Joyce a paradise, do better in the federal capital site tournament?

It may be that Armidale's water credentials weren't good. Would there be water enough enough for a city of 40,000 souls?

At the same 1902 hearing in Armidale at which Dr Grant sang Armidale's praises a local farmer, William Hiscox, gave an unhelpfully objective account of the neighbourhood's charms. He praised local soils but doubted the New England district could grow enough wheat to feed a federal capital city of 40,000 souls.

Then, it would have been helpful if William had gushed about a sparkling abundance of local waters. Champions of Canberra were to go into hyperbolic raptures about the eternally surging and babbling Cotter River. But at the Armidale hearing Hiscox sighed about the shortcomings of the Guyra River reporting that "I know it ceased running last year." The commissioners surely pricked up their ears at that melancholy piece of information.

Today, by unfortunate contrast with the Danuble-like might of Canberra's mighty Molonglo River (blossoming out into the splendour of the ornamental waters of Lake Burley Griffin) Armidale is reported to depend upon the thin trickle of a Dumaresq Creek.

By contrast with the diffident Hiscox, when it came for Queanbeyan and our region's champions to trumpet this place's fertility they really went to town. The Father of Canberra' Queanbeyan's John Gale declared that his supernaturally plump and juicy locally grown fruits took all the prizes at the Sydney show. He also trumpeted (did anyone do any similar advertising for Armidale?) that the Canberra site was a paradise for "manly fieldsports". Citizens there would find "the beautiful lyrebird" and the "wombat" in superabundance to point a blunderbuss at.

Canberrans seem to be sharing the horror of the nightmarish thought of having to leave Canberra and go to Armidale. What is it we so love about effervescent, broad-shouldered Canberra (population 400,000) that the thought of small, bucolic Armidale (population 24,000) appalls us?

My sense is that Canberra has never been so stimulating a city to live in. Those of us who live here are metrosexuals who adore cities. We agree with Dr Johnson that when a man is tired of city life he is tired of life per se. Johnson said cities offered "all that life can afford" whereas "a man's mind grows narrow in a narrow place".

I suspect that Armidale may be a narrow place and that, transported there for the term of my natural working life, I'd pine for Canberra. I'd miss, say, the throbbing thrills of the CBR Brave (ice hockey) matches, the uplifting concerts of the shimmering Canberra Symphony Orchestra, the way in which futuristic light rail systems promise to criss-cross this metropolis helping to keep us the gleaming envy of the urbanised world.

To be tired of Canberra but to be hungry for Armidale is to be tired of life.