![Sheep outside Old Parliament House circa 1940. Picture: National Library of Australia/RC Strangman Sheep outside Old Parliament House circa 1940. Picture: National Library of Australia/RC Strangman](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/fdcx/dc5syd-645bt2e6kzc10zn9899a.jpg/r0_8_3543_2567_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Canberra now elects five federal parliamentarians and is the site for pre-election addresses and debates at the National Press Club.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
Which means that national politicians, albeit reluctantly, need to invest a modicum of their time here during federal election campaigns.
But the press club at Barton has not always existed and for decades after its establishment as the national capital Canberra was not represented in federal parliament.
In earlier times therefore there was utterly no need for electioneering politicians to spend a single second in the capital.
This absence of a need to campaign in Canberra bred an eerie calm here when the rest of the nation voted.
How disconcerting this peacefulness could be is captured in a diary kept by Eilean Giblin, a prominent resident of Canberra during World War II.
The National Library of Australia has a typed-up version of the wartime Giblin diary. Canberra's civic historians - from the late Jim Gibbney to Professor Nicholas Brown - have mined it for information as has Patricia Clarke who published a biography of Eilean Giblin in 2013.
The English-born Eilean was a feminist with a suffragette past. She was a trained carpenter and a pioneering Canberra potter.
Her husband Lyndhurst had ended up as Ritchie Professor of Economic Research at the University of Melbourne. He was a veteran of the Great War and a former member of the Tasmanian state parliament.
The Giblins moved to Canberra in the winter of 1940 when Lyndhurst agreed to head up the Commonwealth Advisory Committee on Financial and Economic Policy which was an official wartime think tank.
The Giblins arrived in Canberra at an opportune time.
On the Monday night after they arrived at their new residence in Empire Circuit they dutifully sat down by their wireless to listen to prime minister Robert Menzies give a 90-minute federal election policy speech.
![Robert Menzies leaves Parliament House for the last time on January 18, 1966. Picture: N Herfort Robert Menzies leaves Parliament House for the last time on January 18, 1966. Picture: N Herfort](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/fdcx/dc5syd-4yjq28ti7ycl60x747m.jpg/r0_145_3100_1888_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Giblin's reaction to the speech, as recorded in her newly started Canberra diary, was that "it went well on the whole" except for a few religious references which affronted her secularist sensibility.
Canberra did not yet elect a member of parliament which meant that Giblin, an eminently civic minded person, was now disenfranchised unless she sent a postal vote to her former electorate in Melbourne. It is unclear if she did.
Polling day was September 21.
The effect of Canberra's remoteness now kicked in. The bush capital, Eilean noted, was wonderfully silent and peaceful. War in Europe and China was so far away. The only threat from the air in Canberra was the occasional swooping magpie.
The Giblins' shared political position was clear. They favoured wartime Australia being led by an all-party government which, on the home front at least, would draw on the wisdom of economists and other public policy experts seconded to the public service.
For his part, Professor Giblin, as noted in his wife's diary, conscientiously briefed, in the election period and its aftermath, a range of people including the journalist Joe Alexander and politicians from both parties, including of course the treasurer Percy Spender.
The election raged far away in the six states, leaving many Canberrans free to focus on gardening. But distance did not soften Giblin's diary entries. The calibre of candidates was, she considered, "low". Most voters were "semi-educated". Parliamentary democracy was a facade. Robert Menzies was "able but not liked, particularly in Sydney".
A whirlpool of negativity undoubtedly existed. It undercut decisiveness. It took days for an anti-climactic election result to be finalised. The outcome was a hung parliament. Good government, as defined by the Giblins, was put on hold.
Giblin had hoped that voter discontent might lead to fresh and bolder talent being injected into federal parliament.
She was finally disabused of this notion when she attended the swearing in of members at Parliament House on November 20, 1940. After seeing the members en masse, she jotted down that it would be hard to find "a more ordinary, mediocre lot".
The regular sighs of exasperation in the Giblin diary are eloquent. They show that there is nothing new about people being aggrieved with politics and politicians in Australia. This mood prevailed even in Canberra decades ago when, in election season, politicians were all far away.
- Stephen Holt is a Canberra writer.
- To submit a piece to this column, write to history@canberratimes.com.au