It is high, hot summer and as I write our dear city feels (for the seventh successive day) like a plump metropolitan shrimp being sizzled on the barbie of the Limestone Plains.
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How well equipped is Canberra with fun-in-the-sun facilities? As we swelter I am reminded of how Canberra, though facility-pampered in so many ways, lacks any of the delightfully cooling splishy splashy public fountains that adorn so many of the world's cities. On hot days the best of them become popular inner-city oases of relative coolness. Rome is especially blessed with them. Sydney's Archibald Fountain is a masterpiece of splashy splashy splendour.
Modern versions of city fountains are sometimes what's called "interactive fountains" or "spraygrounds". "Sprayground" is a play on the word "playground" because a sprayground is an interactive fountain in which screaming children and chortling adults can frolic on sweltering days. There is a very fine one (why not Google it?) at Granary Square in London's King's Cross. A sprayground and a work of art, it boasts 1080 small fountains all choreographed to erupt in playful, unpredictable ways.
Spraygrounds are now everywhere in the civilised world but I think (readers will leap to correct me if I'm wrong) Canberra somehow doesn't have a single sprayground. Horror! How backward of us! Why does everything in Canberra err on the side of dignified elegance and never on the side of sheer fun? What if Barnaby Joyce's controversial but eerily well-funded Armidale (that magnet to which Canberra public servants are being attracted) already has a sprayground or gets one before we do? The shame of it!
I am frothing and spraying about this subject at this time not only because this is the summer of our discontent but also because the new ACT government needs to be prodded, now, into adding more public art to our city. When I voted Labor at the ACT elections it was not only because I would rather be torn apart by cannibal zombies than ever vote Liberal but also because a Labor government is our best hope of more fine public art for Canberra. The ACT Liberals are art philistines, and populist philistines at that, quick to suck up to those angry, soulless, Trump-like Canberrans who seethe that public art is a scandalous waste of money.
Will the Barr government and especially Gordon Ramsay, its mysterious new minister for the Arts and Community Services, summon up the nerve to splash out on public art? It will take some nerve because as Stanhope and Gallagher ACT Labor governments found the Liberals and the troglodyte letters-to-the-editor classes will rise up against every art purchase. They even raged against the eight-metre Powerful Owl on Belconnen Way, a work of inspirational magnificence for which the Stanhope government paid a trifling $400,000.
But here's a thought, Minister Ramsay. When a work of art takes the form of an "interactive fountain" (as well as the aforementioned one at London's Kings Cross check out the wondrous Crown Fountain in Chicago's Millennium Park where giant faces spit streams of water into a public pool) it is surely harder for the philistines to object. While we can't do any literal interacting with public art like the Powerful Owl (any more than we can literally interact with the Mona Lisa or with Michelangelo's David) a work of art that's also a sprayground is a piece of public art that taxpayers can romp in. Any philistines who speaks out against a proposed sprayground will be complaining against taxpayers being given somewhere to romp.
We urge minister Ramsay to embark, soon, on a taxpayer-funded fact-finding tour of the world's grandest spraygrounds.
