Reading Literary Blockbusters on Ngannawal Country

On Ngunnawal country, the Canberra bubble continues to expand, with its brutalist architecture, national institutions, consulates, and blue-tinged gums from which the Telstra Tower on Black Mountain (aka the Syringe aka the Spaceship Docking Station) emerges. It is not a place well-known for literary production or for the celebration of literature. The roads with their infernal on and off ramps, circuits and curves, are arrayed in patterns to facilitate communication with aliens, or for devil worship. Canberra/Ngambri manages to be the nation’s capital, and remote—provincial—estranged from the artistic and literary metropolitan centres of Australia and the wider world.

When I moved to Canberra from overseas the first time, then returned for second and third go-rounds, I was struck by how dark it was: the lack of street lighting in the suburbs, the ordentlich green spaces with their trees in straight lines. Living in Canberra, it was impossible not to feel distant from places like Hong Kong, London, Berlin, New York, and even Melbourne: it was deathly quiet after 8 pm. When I asked students at the ANU, where I teach, about their plans after graduation, the answer was often that their ambition was to move to Sydney or Melbourne—a desire for a new location, rather than for a career. I felt it too, thinking for a long while that Canberra was just a stepping stone to some other place, where I could feel powerful cultural currents, be immersed in life, rather than feel a sense of being trapped in a metaphorical dam akin to Lake Burley Griffin with its blue-green algae and invasive carp.