{"id":6465,"date":"2014-10-19T12:02:10","date_gmt":"2014-10-19T01:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/soundslikewish.wordpress.com\/?p=6465"},"modified":"2014-10-19T12:02:10","modified_gmt":"2014-10-19T01:02:10","slug":"one-trip-every-month-who-says-canberra-is-boring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/?p=6465","title":{"rendered":"One trip EVERY month: October – Who says Canberra is boring?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some months, rather than leave town, I go tripping around my local area and have just as good a time as if I’d taken a trip to the sea.\u00a0 This weekend, just by walking and riding my bike around the suburbs and by the lake, I’ve seen a few odd things that make me appreciate this beautiful unboring city.\u00a0 Yesterday, for example, I knocked on this door.\u00a0 Clearly the resident is not afraid of anyone:<\/p>\n

\"Bang<\/p>\n

Then I went to the lake to watch the weekend sailors.\u00a0 Let me give you a bit of the history of this central ornament of the nation’s capital, in honour of its 50th anniversary this week.\u00a0 Lake Burley Griffin is an artificial lake formed by damming the Molonglo River.\u00a0 The capital’s designer, the American architect Walter Burley Griffin, is immortalised in the name of the lake.\u00a0 He had included it in his original design in 1912, but the lake project didn’t begin until 1963, and finally the formal opening came in 1964.\u00a0 Residents and visitors have flocked to its shores ever since.<\/p>\n

\"Lake<\/p>\n

For me, it’s a body of water which is neat, if unnatural;\u00a0 it invites us to sit beside it but not to enter it.\u00a0 The water quality is frequently reported as unsuitable for swimming, and therein lies the disappointment.\u00a0 But I must remember that the Molonglo River is narrow and unspectacular, hardly a suitable river for a nation’s capital, unlike the Brisbane River in Brisbane or Sydney Harbour in Sydney.\u00a0 Here’s a photo taken earlier this year as I was walking beside the part of the Molonglo which still exists where the lake ends (begins?);\u00a0 you can see it opening up into the lake on the right:<\/p>\n

\"Molonglo
Molonglo River opening into Lake Burley Griffin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Thanks to Walter Burley Griffin, instead of a stream that even I could swim across, we have a nice big lake.\u00a0 Yesterday I went to watch sailboats sail on it, an excellent antidote to the busyness of life.\u00a0 The weather was heavenly, an ideal spring day;\u00a0 blue sky, warm air, light breeze.\u00a0 If you were fishing, which I wasn’t, there was no need to hold on tight to the rod.\u00a0 No need to hold it at all, in fact:<\/p>\n

\"Lake<\/p>\n

Many of the national institutions are situated lakeside, including the Australian National University.\u00a0 One of the university’s sculptures by the water caught my eye with its aluminium birds roosting on the dead branches of this old gum tree.\u00a0 From a distance they give the impression of a flapping flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos, a familiar sight around here.\u00a0 But a closer look reveals the metal birds also resemble hands reaching up to the sky.\u00a0 The commissioned sculpture, called Witness<\/em>, is by Indonesian artist, Dadang Christanto.<\/p>\n

\"Witness,
Witness, Dadang Christanto, 2004, ANU, Canberra<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After seeing unreal birds in a dead tree, I turned round and saw real plants in a dead car.\u00a0 Another piece of ANU ‘art’.<\/p>\n