Canberra-by-sea

Give a Canberran a long weekend during the warmer parts of the year, and chances are they’ll make a beeline for the South Coast of New South Wales. Like the British Raj upping sticks and shifting out of Delhi for the cooler climes of Shimla, Canberra’s residents pack their tents, fill their eskies and head for the coast as soon as the temperature rises and the calendar allows.

It’s not hard to see why; Canberrans are among the minority of Australians (some 15 per cent) who do not live within 50 kilometres of the coast. In fact, Canberrans live closer to space than they do to the ocean and such is the pulling power of places like Batemans Bay that you may as well call it Canberra-by-Sea during the summer.

Of course, Canberra does have its own little slice of the coast, Jervis Bay, which was set aside in 1915 to give the landlocked capital access to the sea. Why not just build the capital by the sea in the first place and join the other 85 per cent of Australians within reach of the coast?

The answer to that is complicated and comes down to Sydney-Melbourne rivalry (of course); a fear of disease (ship-borne rats and their diseases were all the rage at the time); and concerns that an enemy ship might sail into port and start shooting at things. This last one was a real worry. In 1839, two American warships slipped into Sydney Harbour unannounced under cover of darkness. While they weren’t French or Russian, they could easily have been and their visit sparked a review of the harbour’s defences.

But when you stop to think about it, the whole thing with Jervis Bay was nuts: a port for an inland city more than 200 kilometres away (by road) and completely surrounded (girt?) by another jurisdiction. It smells more like a box-ticking exercise than anything else. Still, a port was deemed necessary so the capital got access to the sea, no matter how impractical.

John Howard had much more success with his Canberra-by-Sea project when he pretty much moved his government to Kirribilli House. I have no doubt he’d have held cabinet and parliament by Sydney Harbour as well if he could have. I’m not one to excuse anything Howard did or stood for, but on this occasion I concede he had a point — if I had a gig that came with a harbour-side mansion with views of the Opera House; I’d be spending my days by the water. Incidentally, Kirribilli also has a good view of Fort Denison, which was built to defend the harbour following the aforementioned scare from the Americans.

Interestingly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, having a Sydney residence for the prime minister sticks in the craw of some residents down south, who feel there needs to be a third prime ministerial pile. To date, none of the efforts for a Melbourne home for the PM have gone anywhere beyond some outraged huffing and puffing.

Not that a Melbourne residence for the PM would have any impact on the line of cars snaking their way along the Kings Highway from Canberra to the coast.