Cold Light (75 page)

As the heavy rains dramatically fell, a beautiful lake appeared, and she had watched the lucerne paddocks, the rabbits and the sheep slowly vanish, and then the old golf course. The lake did not divide the city into two; the lake embraced the new city into an accord.

One day the Prime Minister said to her, as they looked at the lake together, ‘When I remember how every penny spent on Canberra used to be grudged – how many arguments I’d had in travelling from state to state to get this – it delights me, Berry. Australia’s capital has now become an object of pride and pleasure.’

Not always
, she thought, but yes, he had become the great champion of the vision.

He added, ‘It’s an important city doing important things in the national interest.’

She agreed, but said, ‘What I like about it – for all its importance and its scheming – is that it still has a bush soul. Living here, we can all still see the bush from which we come.’

At the opening of the lake, she laughed with the rest when the Prime Minister paused in his speech, looked away, obviously considering his words, and then looked up and said, ‘I don’t think you can declare a lake “open”.’

As she sat there and watched the Prime Minister ‘open’ the lake, she thought that her work for Canberra was over. She had never chosen Canberra as a life mission – it had chosen her. It had been a stop-gap while she waited in line for something from the Department of External affairs, which had never come.

Her Canberra work had been helping to shape the land and the water, the streets and buildings of the city – with a little help from the Griffins and a lot of squabbling architects and planners.

Making uranium safe and useful was her mission now, but she was going to keep an eye on the city.

Some of her dreams for Canberra had come right, and the rest would come right in time. Fingers crossed. All children could walk safely to school on their own, or ride a bike or a horse. On waking, everyone would see the sky and the sun when they looked out their window and would never live in the shadow of tall buildings. Toilets would be indoors and separated from the bathroom. The houses would not have front fences but become part of the street park, and all neighbours and passing people would say hello as you hosed the front garden – maybe low hedges could be allowed. Paths to the front door would curve; would not be a dull straight line from street to door. The back garden would be for the privacy of the householders to do as they pleased. People would be encouraged to eat out more, instead of each family eating alone every night hunched over a quarrelsome table. In the local cafés, people would come to know each other and draw up their chairs and chat about things that mattered.

Every neighbourhood would have a shopping square surrounded by a park, and would have a meeting hall and a tavern for drinking coffee or a bottle of wine with nuts at the end of the day. There would be public squares – piazzas – where young people could be diverted from ‘the mischievousness and folly natural to their age, and under handsome porticos may spend the heat of the day and be mutually serviceable to one and another’, as the Italian Leon Battista Alberti urged in the 1400s. She had read this out to Gibson and anyone else who would listen at the Congress.

Animals and children would be everywhere and allowed into cafés.

Everyone would be in a permanent conversation about the Canberra dream, including those who did not live in Canberra. Canberra was the only city in Australia that was everyone’s business. Already, everyone had an opinion about it. Through argument, everyone would help make it.

And people would travel to work together, swiftly and colourfully and cheerfully, in the smart trams and buses of the city – the best in the world. And on the brightly painted buses and tram cars, on some days, there would be a surprise – a famous person shaking hands; a renowned singer singing; a champion sportsman signing autographs – and there would be poetry and jokes on placards in the cars, and roving musicians.

And the lake ferries would be the same – gaily painted and be-flagged on special occasions – taking people to and from work from lakeside ports. The lake would echo with music played by roving musicians or by the employees themselves on their way home in the evenings – accordions, flutes, recorders, guitars. Not too loudly. And not tin whistles; she had no fondness for the tin whistle.

Or did people want their transport to be quiet? The
New Yorker
magazine was campaigning against the broadcasting of radio in public places such as railway stations. She supposed she would have to allow that some people would drive motorcars to work, and on car wirelesses supplied by the Broadcasting Commission they would listen to symphony music, or the best music of the day, or to news and talk by the best minds of the world.

The city would be governed and owned in a cooperative and communal fashion. On some nights, people would go to exhibitions and lectures, and talk of serious matters – art, literature and science – in a jolly way.

Canberra would be a social laboratory and would try out all sorts of ideas for good living and would lead the country. There would be no private health, law or education – all would be fairly available to all citizens as a right, and to all children free of charge. The best doctors, lawyers and schools would not be available only to the rich. There would be, as the Prime Minister had said, no ‘forgotten people’.

She was not sure what to do with Griffin’s idea of a capitol building above that of parliament on Capitol Hill, the highest point on the plain. He had not spelled it out, but he had wanted a place where the citizens could meet and from which the elected representatives could ‘hear the roar of the crowd’. She saw it as a pantheon – a place of continuous conference on all matters – which would be used for permanent, ongoing evening classes. It would be a magnificent centre for citizens to study and research on democracy, on Australian history. Although it was all something of a mystery to her, she thought that it would be a good idea to study the history of the Aboriginals. She had recently learned that Aboriginals had lived around Canberra before white settlement. Perhaps there was more to be known about the Aboriginals – apart from, that is, what was known by the anthropologists. She had never learned anything about all this. There could be a permanent and continuous series of courses for adult learning at all levels, and research both professional and non-professional would be done by all those interested. Every so often, every Australian would be eligible for travel and accommodation, living expenses, grants to take courses or engage in research, whether it be to study gardening or stamp collecting. It should be a place where every citizen had a chance to do some serious thinking about those things that bothered them.

And working hours should never be so arduous that they made people too tired to do the other things citizens should value after work. She thought that even the eight-hour day was perhaps too long.

Thus, the capitol-on-the-hill above the parliament would give thoughtful citizens oversight to the parliament, and be a source of unusual and fresh advice for it.

Her first great revelation about the city had been that it was the national memory, but she now thought – because of all that would be stored there in museums and other places – that it would be a place for the citizens to ask questions.

Instead of grumbling about the fine and unusual – distinctive – roads, they should be curious about why they were planned like that. Then the road should be asked to speak.

She had arrived at the insight that Canberra would have to serve two types of citizens – those who were its residents and all those Australians who would visit it many times. It was a city to live in and a city to visit and study. And a place of physical achievement. The sports – she mustn’t forget the sports.

She thought it was a human desire not to be forgotten, to be recognised. To have one’s existence recorded and recognised by others was, in her theological opinion, the only way to eternal life. And the city would do that for all our names and our histories and the histories of our families – how we arrived here and what we had done before we came here and what we had done after we had come here.

The city would be our Chartres Cathedral, only more: Chartres tells only the bible stories: this capitol would tell everyone’s story. Everyone’s name would be here; everyone’s life experience would be here.

She had read that art museums, libraries and ancient architecture were not only an exposure to artworks of the past, they were also the gifts of dead artists to the living human community – gifts of innovation and excellence of thought and aspirations of beauty. They were the dead speaking to us through the very best that the human species could create. The dead speak to us this way – not through ouija boards or phoney spiritualism or the so-called voice of God.

This city would be the place where we would be led to contemplate ourselves.

The whole city – not only the capitol-on-the-hill of which she dreamed – would be a philosophical centre.

She was glad that – as a start – Canberra now had the School of Anatomy, the War Memorial and the National University, and of course the magnificent Shine Dome for the Academy of Science. She loved thinking of it as the Martian Embassy; Mr T had named it thus.

And when it was decided that a mistake had been made in the planning of the city, they could pull it down and start again – bad buildings could be pulled down, wrong roads dug up. They would try again: self-criticism and self-correction. Some of the city would be temporary, but the temporary could have elegance.

As Mr Maybeck had said, a city such as Canberra was an ‘incremental experiment’ – things taken away; things added; things altered. To plan and arrange our living in our world was a higher human impulse than the building of the slums of industrial England. Planning was human. The first questions humans asked themselves were: how close together should we live? Where should we put our excrement?

But she was well aware of the difficulties of defining a wish. And, as with hope, a wish was not a plan. A plan was only the beginning of a creation, not its fixed conclusion.

She was roused from her city dreaming by the clapping as the lake was formally opened and the music of the military band struck up.

As she looked out at the placid new lake, she knew that if she had anything to do with it, all this would come about.

H
er fifth essay on nuclear issues had appeared in
Search
. She prophesied that the world would have to think very hard about what to do with nuclear waste matter as more nuclear power plants were built and when, ultimately, nuclear weapons were all decommissioned. She argued that sending it off into space or into the sun where it would be consumed involved the risk of catastrophic launch failure. She also applied her rule about taking an action when the consequences were completely unknown and breathtaking in their scale of execution. Likewise, with the other proposal of seabed burial, where submarines would deposit canisters of nuclear waste in subduction faults, which would carry the waste downward toward the earth’s mantle. She said that other ways would have to be found.