“Thredbo was one of the first Australian towns to be planned and built ‘in sympathy with the natural environment”, says an eager voice from underneath a festering pile of snowboarding equipment. The van is wheezing steadily higher, puffs of hot air scalding my leg.

“That’s nice, can you reach the clutch pedal from there?”

The van lurches forward again seemingly unimpressed at carrying enough gear to recreate Shackleton’s expedition. The clutch screams again, and we’re treated to the smell of burning oil and penguins. A pile of snowboards clatters sideways.

“We’re nearly there!” I shout towards the shaking mound at my elbow.

Soon the bush grows quieter and we are treated to Ghost Gums festooned in globular snow. Heavy cloud limits our visibility to just in front of the windscreen wipers. Nearing Thredbo and the weather begins to clear, revealing a little village of European-style apartments pitched pleasingly against the hillside. I’ve never even seen Australian snow – my snowboarding experience was, up until this point, limited to dodgy snowboarding trips while at university in New Zealand.

The ski field carpark is filling fast. Shiny four wheel drives disgorge extremely clean children smelling of suncream and toothpaste. Their parents stretch like pedigree cats, assiduously checking their phones for reception. We do our best to look tidy, which isn’t easy in a disintegrating Toyota LiteAce that travels through time and space in the fashion of a meteor shower. I’m relieved to see that Thredbo’s subdued palette does not extend to the ski-field patrons, most of whom look like the human equivalent of a Formica kitchen.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been on a mountain. The last I attempted to invert my entire body, fillings first. Of course, now I’m older. More responsible. I’ll be fine.

I make my way to the toilets for a nervous wee and am greeted with a throng of young women laminated in fashionable get-ups. They’re doing Hair and Make-up, railing against the cruel irony that no matter how colourful the snowboarding outfit is, it’ll always look more or less like you’re wearing a floor-to-ceiling sanitary pad. Having spent my snowboarding years New Zealand where ‘alpine-fashion’ extends to your slimmest cut-off sleeping bag, this newfound glamour is bewildering. Up until that moment my idea of snowboarding fashion was to avoid being completely coated in my own blood.

We make our way through the thousands of glittering skiers and wait to be scooped up by the silent, magical chairlift. Ten minutes later I am on the top of the mountain, with trails spread out before me, tracking down from a now cloudless, azure day.  It’s so busy, hundreds of people expertly swooping away from me. I’m beginning to feel nervous and pressured with the crowds. Although there are commercial fields similar to Thredbo in New Zealand, many kiwi skiers and snowboarders belong to more rustic ‘club fields’, a perilously steep succession of paddocks covered in nostril deep fresh powder for half of the year. Patrons are sparse. Membership of a club field includes a small fee and several days of labour on the facilities, such as shearing sheep or pulling great skeins of human skin out of the nutcracker tow. But the payoff is clear: endless days filled with acres of fluffy, dry untouched snow.

I’m suddenly nostalgic for the days where snowboarding meant stuffing 12 people into a front-wheel-drive Laser and hurtling sideways up a gravel road, balancing cups of instant coffee on your knee while wolfing down Moro bars. The perilous mountain drives of my youth were much like a hot-wash in a very old Fisher and Paykel – everyone arrives at the snow slightly browner and covered in second degree burns. We’d pile out, hysterical with poor judgement and sleep deprivation, apply three layers of duct tape to everything and set off into a blizzard. There were no chairlifts, cafes selling hot chips or enough foreign medical personnel to staff a small African war. If you were lucky, Ollie might have a packet of plasters in the glove box.

This is not to suggest for a moment that New Zealand’s snowboarders do not lack for sophistication or ambition. The country produces some of the best in the world. During a relatively short snowboarding career I myself mastered some of the more fashionable and elaborately named ‘freestyle tricks’ such as ‘a slidey’ or ‘going backwards for a bit’. It’s worth noting that like all great scientific discoveries, truly magnificent snowboarding manoeuvres are often discovered in the process of looking for something else. Like your phone. Or your gloves. Or your keys. At speed.

All these previous gains count for little however as I navigate the dog-eat-dog terrain of Thredbo.  The snow feels hard and icey beneath my board, and I’m suddenly aware how cold it is.

A young man hurtles past me at indecent speed. Then another, and another. I’ve become unfeasibly tired and wobbly but I dare not falter, lest I become a speed bump in this high stakes video game. Trees loom menacingly out from the edges of the run. More and more brightly coloured young people hurtle past at the speed of lycra, zipping around me – the lonely dugong in a shoal of sardines. Suddenly I’m down, falling backwards onto the rough ice with a gentle but heartfelt ‘FUCKIT’. I sit and spend a moment gathering my wits in the wet snow. A foetus swooshes to a halt beside me and asks if I need an ambulance. No. But a cup of tea might just do the trick. He smiles winningly and whips away like a minty little zephyr.

I stare down the cold, rocky mountain with resignation. The time has come to accept it: I’m too old for this shit.

Described to me variously as; ‘that soulless city’, a ‘shuddering vacuum of Australian ennui’ and, more succinctly, ‘the Hole’, my expectations were understandably high for my first trip to Our Nation’s Capital.

Strictly speaking, I have actually been to Canberra before. Like many Sydneysiders I’ve driven through it on the way back from the snow. It’s worth noting that mid-winter Canberra at 3am bears up remarkably well compared to mid-winter Cooma at 2am. This time however, I was in for the long haul, a two month contract in the City of Circles.

At the end of my first week I found myself engaged in Canberran gardening – excavating a pile of half-frozen mail off the driveway. A glossy promotional brochure earnestly informing me that “Canberra is Unique” clattered to the ground. And at the end of a bone-chilling, sour-skyed week in August, I had to agree. It was hard to think of any other city that has managed to harness complete soul-destroying banality with such pitch-perfect virtuosity. And yet I’m still struggling to put a finger on precisely where it’s all gone wrong.

But I’ll give it a stab.

Let’s begin with Glebe Park. Glebe Park is a highly manicured, English style ‘green’ that lies adjacent to the carefully delineated Civic Centre (yes, that is a proper noun). The sign at the park’s entrance functions as a cultural lodestone, that is, it tells you everything you will ever need to know about this park, but also the city it lies within. A numbered list of suggestions tells the visitor how the park should be used. For instance you could,  “Have a picnic” (Fig. 1.1) or “Take a walk”. The instructions are reasonably comprehensive, although on the day I was there I noted a couple of glaringly obvious omissions, such as;

– Build an ice-cave

– Experiment with computational fluid dynamics in the Rudd Wind Tunnel (circling the rotunda. Bring gloves).

– Enjoy the only architecturally designed toilet facilities visible from space, for those celebratory Devil-May-Care reach-arounds (again, gloves a must).

Glebe Park’s fulsome signage tells us more about Canberra than simply how to eat a sandwich. It hints at the city’s broader predicament, the reason for its unsettling quietude. The sign vindicates the truism that urban planning is more art than science. Of course, all Australian cities contain ‘planned parks’, they’re just less proscriptive, designed to accommodate a range of pleasurable activities, rather than dictate them in long-form. This helps citizens avoid the feeling that they’re living in a dishwasher manual.

In most cities, human activity en masse interacts with planning in symbiosis: the people make the city, the city shapes the actions of the people. The result is often a little messy, but ultimately human and knowable. Canberra, on the other hand, is like Legoland with ducks.

For me, Canberra’s strong-armed approach to ‘lifestyle’ brought out an anarchic streak I never realised I had. I found myself hurtling around the city like an angry marble in a vacuum cleaner, desperately resisting the urge to drive over roundabouts and or go Cirque De Soliel at Floriade with the RoundUp. Those who make Canberra their home, however, seem to appreciate its charms. Happiness can be found in a city that wrenches order from chaos, comfort from unsettling sponteneity. More prosaically they find solace in their staggeringly high incomes and a collective project of cognitive dissonance. As the weeks progressed I found myself staring at them like safari animals. Clustered around coffee shops, men in ubiquitous black suits, women in muted, stretch ‘chair wear’, lanyards flapping in the fitful wind they’d smile and chat, fingering their swipe cards like rosary beads, as if part of an exclusive religious sect, or perhaps on highly paid home detention. Dinner party conversations often featured exchanges a little like this,

“Oh I know, I mean, to begin with I was thinking: Urgh, Canberra! How will I survive a week in the pall of its all-encompassing, soul-destroying crushing malaise? But that cycleway around the lake is really nice. And it’s so easy to get around!”

Yes. Getting around. Let’s talk about that, shall we?

We’ve all heard it said that in order to truly find oneself you must first completely lose oneself. Less clear is whether this process should unfold through stuttering fits of rage brought on by the inability to find a two litre bottle of milk. Because, as I discovered, it’s the newcomer who is most keenly attuned to Canberra’s geographical sense of distributed order.

In most “normal” Australian cities you get an intuitive sense of topography. Without noticing it, subtle cues tell you how to get around. The  scale of the housing is usually the first clue: densely packed apartments grow into sprawling suburbs which in turn meet with rural land and Greenfield developments. But there are more subtle clues too. For instance, as you approach the centre of a city you encounter clusters of shops, bus stops, traffic jams, urban parks, small housing developments, rubbish bins spilling onto cluttered footpaths and overhead wires. These things all contribute to an intuitive sense of gathering scale and also give us some sense of where one might find other geographical features, like a beach, harbour or river (for the record, a three and a half hectare roundabout is not a feature). On top of that, most Australian cities are scalar and radiate generally outwards along main arterial roads. Taken together these factors result in sense of direction seems almost intuitive. But it isn’t, it’s simply a function of a city’s iterative, untidy planning processes, of contested human histories inscribed on the landscape. It’s a somewhat messy but intensely human sense of order, and it helps you navigate and begin to feel at home.

In Canberra, on the other hand, these clues are missing. Canberra’s development was about as iterative as the Big Bang. It was designed, planned and built in the time it takes to ‘give that filing cabinet a birthday’. As such, it doesn’t feel like other cities. This is why you can’t find a petrol station. Or several bottles of wine. But don’t fret, frustrated newcomer, they planned for this too! A plethora of large, clear signs guides you around the city (Blade Of Grass, 300m), it’s just that without the other visual clues, they’re somewhat meaningless.

I don’t, however, want to give the impression that all is literally lost. Finding a nationally significant work of art for instance is child’s play, as is locating several cheery reminders that Australia has wandered into any number of wars.

Canberra’s bewildering layout holds other advantages too. All this driving around gives a thoroughgoing appreciation of the city’s architecture. This is, however, the definition of a mixed blessing. It’s a cruel irony that some of the country’s most important institutions are enshrined in eye-wateringly ugly concrete bunkers.

For instance, the NGA resembles a shoddily rendered, overblown Tuppaware party while the National Archives looks like someone forgot to build a dam on top of it. In fact, half of the inner city looks like a skatepark on its side, interspersed with squat office blocks with the lumpen grandiosity of an East German mausoleum.

Being the capital, Canberra is also home to some of the most drastic national monuments ever conceived. All are conveniently located beside main arterial routes. Spend an afternoon hurtling around one of Canberra’s four thousand roundabouts (an afternoon driving around Canberra is akin to three hours in a centrifuge – not recommended, although it does make your hair pleasingly glossy) and you can’t avoid them. I’m particularly fond of the American-Australian monument that celebrates our snuggly-wuggly relationship.

The monument’s brief was that it should be in keeping with “…the wide (flat) horizons of the Canberra landscape“. At almost 100 meters tall, this thin, tapered rod punctures the leaden sky, providing a slender perch for a Nazi-style eagle that peers down across the city. This thing could not be more American if it had a fingernail on the top of it.  

But it’s the rest of the city, the hunkered-down suburban morass, drearily named for one cardigan wearing Prime Minister after another, that most unseats the newcomer. Winding through Canberra it’s easy to experience a rising sense of panic. Bluffed in the Mobius suburbs, each street identical to the last, your apoplectic exclamations are noiselessly swallowed by yet another stretch of tidy, blank bungalows. You could ask someone for directions, but who? Outdoors, humans are sparse and those that do appear wear worksafe ear-muffs to drown out the leaf blower.

You turn left. Then right. Have I got enough water? Petrol? Your pulse quickens. Are there any sweets left in the glove box? Another lap. And another. Is that the McDonalds wrapper I passed an hour ago?

It’s impossible to eventually exit Canberra without the haunting suspicion that you might have inadvertently purchased a shipping container’s worth of unpronouncable Swedish furniture.

But, it’s not all bad. Due to the obscenely high average income and the fact that most Birkenstocks fly right off before you can land a kick, Canberra has the most genteel junkie population I’ve ever seen. On top of that the city hosts some seriously left-wing social experiments, including thriving community housing co-operatives, armies of furiously cycling Freegans, and just enough bogans seeping through from ‘the Bush’ to keep the librarians honest. And, of course, that cycleway around the lake is really nice

Last Tuesday, a rainy, mid winter day on the way home from the city, my daughter and I stumbled upon the Holy Grail of op-shopping, a motherlode of pristine, virtually untouched toys. Thank you, Eastern Sydney, for the middle class consumer guilt that prevents you from binning the froth of your consumer churn. Now my daughter can access a range of colourful, BPA-free gender neutral toys that will no doubt provide her with the emotional and ethical intelligence to powerfully engage in a range of ‘circles’.

Inside the op-shop I give my daughter the usual drill, (you can have one thing that doesn’t take batteries, make noise or piss Mummy off) and within about 30 seconds she is totally engrossed, playing quietly to her heart’s content. Just then a bloodcurdling scream erupts from behind me. I whirl around to see a staff member on the point of collapse, a plastic train clutched in her dimpled fist and a nest of scarves at her feet.

“What’s this doing in here? I just put this FUCKIN toy out and already it’s been moved into this box of FUCKIN scarves!”

She’s shrieking and turning crimson, carnival-blue eyeliner is running down her cheeks and tiny beads of sweat dance amongst the hairs on her top lip which has started quivering like a pornographic hearth-brush. The woman marches towards my daughter in a straight-legged fit, profanities pouring from her puce, lacquered lips. Bewildered and moments from full-blown terror my daughter raises her arms to me and screams: “Mum!” I rip the toys out of her hands, scoop her up and we make for door before this sweating, painted behemoth goes Romper-Stomper with a plastic love-heart.

Out on the street my little girl begins to howl. I hold her tightly and produce a lollipop from my handbag. She licks at the lolly, mollified, and we make our way to the bus station.

Public transport is the jewel in any city’s crown, and Bondi Junction is certainly keeping the flame alive, seamlessly melding ‘retail experience’ and ‘restaurant precinct’. We make our way past the flickering displays of mobile phone covers and sunglasses, flanked by freezing Chinese students standing around like puckered statues. A towering sushi restaurant looms ahead of us. Through the window a lone gentleman picks half-heartedly at a small plate of disheveled rice, in between cheek-swelling swigs of white wine. The sushi train’s hypnotic effect is winning and he’s taken on an early lean. Two young Japanese women in neatly pressed aprons chat to one another and wipe around him.

The windblown rain licks up round the chipped tiles, soaking our feet and turning the ramps to Teflon as we make our way past the McDonalds, ankle deep in blustery rubbish and the overwhelming smell of piss.

I press the button for the lift to the bus station and wait. And wait. And wait. Presently we are joined by an enormous woman in a thin green tracksuit. Slicked in sweat she struggles onto the small platform and hoists her sagging gut up onto the cross-bar of a filthy stroller, which contains a small grey and white dog.

Anyone with a small child knows that a fluffy dog in a stroller is the equivalent of a cubic metre of MDMA flavoured play-doh. My daughter is transfixed. She lunges for the little dog. The woman tells me that his name is Woopsy and that he is tied in. I smile at her, but it’s hard to tell if she’s noticed because her forehead had temporarily fallen over her face. The lift travels straight past us, heading for the bowels of the earth.

“There goes the lift Mum!” announces my daughter, slightly upset. She loves lifts and now it’s gone.

“We’ll get it on the way back up” I assure her.

Little Woopsy was looking forward to the ride too. He is growing increasingly anxious, shooting diagonally out of his stroller like a hairy yo-yo. He lunges, teeth snapping, at my daughter’s face.

“Don’t worry,” says his ‘Mummy’, her eyes roaming freely around the compass, “he’s vaccinated”. One of Woopsy’s legs starts performing a quarter of the Nutcracker Suite, totally unbidden. His left eye joins the party.

We enter the lift and begin the interminable ride down one level, struck with wonderment at the glass-walled elevator experience that treats us to a rolling vertical panorama of all the flotsam and jetsam that slips between the edge of a lift shaft and the floor of a busy train station. Of all the installation works in the Sydney Biennale it’s this subterranean bisection of a train station’s collected filth, a moving window of pleghmy, disastrously hairy time capsules, that I’ve most enjoyed.

I am retrieved from my reverie by our lift mate, who produces a soft cone ice cream from her pocket. Woopsy, it seems, loves an ice cream. But not as much as his Mummy.

“One for you, one for me” she mumbles, savouring a hairy mouthful and wiping her mouth on her spine. She turns back to me,

“It’s fuckin rude how you have to make a purchase just to get the last of the money out of your account”, she says, with unexpected zeal.

‘Yes’ I mumble, looking down at the dog.

Woopsy has proved his name.

We reach the ground floor and make our way to the ticket machine, inserting a five dollar note, for which my daughter is rewarded with a stream of small coins delivered, gatling gun style, at eye level. We collect our tickets and make for the bus. It’s packed, but we find a bench seat up the front, facing the only two empty seats on the bus – next to a shuddering junkie who appears to be in the process of inverting himself.

“I want to go and sit over there! On that seat! That seat is empty!” yelps my daughter.

“No, you can sit on my knee”

“But I don’t want to sit on your knee! I WANT TO SIT OVER THERE AND GET TWO TYPES OF HEPATITIS!”

I jam her into the stroller while she screams and screams. I pat her leg feebly and look out the window, feeling the collective glare from the clutch of old women sitting together by the door. I’ve suddenly developed poncy-blond-with-jogging-stroller deafness, confirming all their prejudices at once. The bus rumbles through the rain, the driver shouts at a motorist and a flash of pointy cyclists disappears into bow-wave behind us. I stare out at the rain. Almost home.