12 March: Canberra

Canberra, capital of Australia, was officially named on 12 March 1913. Most people know it's the capital of Australia, but what else is there to know about the place?

1. The first people to live in the area were Indigenous Australians: the Ngunnawal people, alongside the Ngarigo and Walgulu to the south, the Wandandian to the east, the Gandangara people to the north, and the Wiradjuri to the north west. Europeans arrived in the 1820s. Joshua John Moore had a homestead built there in 1823 and called it "Canberry".
2. The name Canberra is thought to come from the Indigenous Australian word for “meeting place”, because it is situated between two mountains, Black Mountain and Mt Ainslie. That's the official story since nobody alive can verify it. The two mountains give rise to another, unofficial theory, that it derives from the word for a woman's breast.
3. Canberra was chosen as the capital of Australia because Sydney and Melbourne couldn't agree over which of them should be capital, so it was thought best to go for somewhere entirely different. Canberra was the one place that fitted the criteria for the location of the capital city.
4. The city was designed by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, architects from Chicago, who won a contest for the contract in 1911. Their plan featured geometric shapes - circles, hexagons and triangles, and an eight legged star in the centre. The city is aligned with the significant topographical landmarks in the surrounding area. When they won the contest, the Australian authorities didn't know that the couple had links with several esoteric and occult groups. This fact came to light later, and has led to theories that there was a “secret plan of Canberra”, based on the “cosmic canon of the ancients”, and this was why there were so many geometric patterns in the plans. Part of the Griffins' original plan was to cover Mount Ainslie, Black Mountain, and Red Hill with flowers, so that each hill would be covered with one of the primary colours, representing the spiritual value of the hill. This never happened, because construction was delayed by the first World War, and after that, Griffin and Prime Minister Billy Hughes clashed over the planning and the Griffins were fired.
5. The city is built around an artificial lake named after the designers - Lake Burley Griffin. Lake Burley Griffin has two bridges. The design was influenced by the garden city movement, so there are lots of trees and green spaces, earning Canberra the nickname of The Bush Capital.
6. Canberra is about 170 miles south-west of Sydney and 410 miles north-east of Melbourne. On census night in August 2011, the population of Canberra was 355,596. The median age is 34 years, and only 10.7% of the population is aged over 65.
7. The area of the city is 314.4 square miles or 814.2 square km.
8. Despite being the capital city and centre of government, Canberra has fewer politicians per capita than any other state or territory. There would have been even less during John Howard's tenure, as he was the only Australian PM since 1927 who chose not to live in the Lodge in Yarralumla, the PM's official residence.
9. Canberra was once reputed to have more restaurants and cafés per head than any other city in the world, even beating Paris, but Adelaide and Perth both now claim to have more.
10. Canberra is twinned with Beijing, China, Nara, Japan and Wellington, New Zealand.

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