Thursday January 21st

Today I went to Canberra. It's a three hour drive from Sydney along the Great Dividing Range and, once out of Sydney the landscape changes quite quickly. Lots of flat open field with sheep and goats, yellow grass and the odd olive plantation. Canberra sits in a bowl so the first intimation we had of arriving was the familiar blue and yellow of the local IKEA!

I spent an interesting few hours in the National Museum of Australia which is a brilliant museum, very well organised with some fascinating displays. Coincidentally  their main exhibition at the moment is artefacts from early settlements on loan from  the British Museum.

 

This notice at the end of the exhibition called Encounters was particularly noteworthy.

 

There were many interesting exhibits from the early days of Australia , such as this saw doctor's wagon; a mobile repair shop for farmers,

 

 

and the bicycle le used by Eric Old, who, in his 70s challenged himself to cycle to ever state capital from his home in Melbourne. He achieved his aim by his 76th birthday and his last marathon ride was at the age of 86 when he rode from Melbourne to Bendigo

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The Garden of Australian Dreams is in the middle of this very modern building.

 

 

This is a symbolic landscape based on a slice of central Australia. A concrete surface makes a map of the area, one step equals 100kms. The words on the surface say home in 100 different languages nd the lines which cross it represent surveyors' references, road maps, the dingo fence, and indigenous nation and language boundaries. The  Uluru line begins at the entrance to the museum, swoops up into a loop then continues as a wide, red footpath and ends in a curled concrete ramp conceptually continuing north west to Uluru.

 

Unfortunately Parliament was not sitting but we were able to wander around the buildings (even parking underground!). The building is dug into Capital Hill and has a grass roof so that the first thing immediately visible is the 81m high flagpole.

 

 

 

 Opened in 1988 it is a very modern building, very different from our own Houses of Parliament.

 

 

The House of Representatives

                                                          The Senate

 

The view from Parliament House was somewhat spoiled by the staging being assembled for Australia Day, and by the heavy rain which followed us all the way back to Sydney.