In an excoriating attack on the Australian media, the creative director of the Canberra Centenary, Robyn Archer, today urged journalists to revise their reporting on the national capital.
Archer was giving the National Australia Bank address at the National Press Club, and argued that imagery of disease, murder, war and betrayal were commonly connected with Canberra in media reportage. Quoting selected headlines —“Canberra treating people like mugs” and “Condescension thy name is Canberra” she said it was “a national disgrace” that Canberra was commonly represented as either “a hateful entity” or “the enemy of the people.”
Pleading, she said, on behalf of 360,000 Canberrans, she urged journalists to say “the Federal Government” when that was what they meant and “Canberra,” when that was that they meant. She deplored the habit of knocking Canberra as if Sydney and Melbourne were the only models for “the city.”
She said she had imagined that this “nonsense and non sequitur” was absent from English and American politics until she noticed President Obama in a recent State of the Union address claiming, “The problem is with Washington.”
Archer quoted from an article in “The Spectator” describing Canberra as “an anonymous backwater where people have no place,” adding that many whingeing commentators wrote as if the national capital that could easily be lifted and taken somewhere else — “guys, it’s not going to happen,” she said. Archer said that a survey done by the centenary office had shown that the majority of Australians believe that they do have a stake in the national capital, and urged a group of schoolchildren visiting the club from Townsville to take their part in the events foreshadowed for 2013.
To Archer, correspondence between architect Walter Burley Griffin and politician King O’Malley well-illustrated the early optimism about Canberra, a place in which, Prime Minister Andrew Fisher said: “The best thoughts of Australia will be given expression to.”
“We need powerful symbols and our capital is perfectly placed to be one,” she said.
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