A fan letter to Canberra
and its under-appreciated creative underground.
This email is quite long, so if you’re reading it in your inbox and it cuts off you can read it in full here.
Canberra, my hometown, is a little misunderstood. I’ve asked other Canberrans and they agree.
“I think the problem with it,” Jennifer Higgie tells me, “is that people think a capital city should be like London or New York — not that NY is a capital city — and Canberra is not that. But if you go with no expectations, then it’s such a weird and wonderful place.”
Jennifer is the author of many brilliant books, the former editor of Frieze magazine, and a fellow London-based Canberra girl. I connected with her through what I would call a classic Canberra coincidence.
In 1973, her family and my dad’s family were on a boat bound for Sydney from Genoa taking lots of Aussies home from European postings. From what Dad tells me, it was a fantastic time to be ten years old. Fast forward a few decades and Jennifer’s mother buys Jennifer’s books from my dad. Fast forward again and I’m telling Jennifer a version of this story at a talk she gave in April on her latest book The Other Side at the London Library.
In both her book and her talk, she spoke so fondly of her Canberra days in the 80s and 90s — a time when the city was, as she tells me on Zoom a few weeks later, flowering with creativity:
“It was amazing. I was at art school and everyone I knew was in a band. I was in a band called Get Set Go with my sister Susie before she was in the Falling Joys, Stevie Plunder who went on to be in the Plunderers, the Whitlams, and Nick Dalton who went on to be in the LemonHeads. Then the Falling Joys were sort of post-punk, I suppose you’d call them, and they were a really fantastic band. They got really big in the 90’s and had a number 1 record. Susie is an amazing musician.”
To set the scene a little for those who are unfamiliar, Canberra is not known to the outside world, or really to the rest of Australia, for its thriving music scene. On the contrary, people think it’s kind of boring, just a government town full of roundabouts and public servants. I met a girl from Melbourne at a screening in Shoreditch the other day who likened it to Milton Keynes, which I resented, although both towns are artfully planned.
Canberra was built from the ground up in 1913, about 280 km South West of Sydney and 660 km North East of Melbourne. At the time, no one could decide which of these two major cities should be named the Capital, so they compromised and built a new one somewhere in the middle. Before it was Canberra, the land hosted dairy farmers like my grandma’s family, and for over 21,000 years it has been home to the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people — who remain the rightful owners of the land it sits on today.
It’s a city of loops and grids, the roads are wide and smooth, and it gets its nickname “Bush Capital” from its endless trees and nature reserves. The oldest buildings lean towards Art Deco, like the iconic Manuka pool, a spot I visited countless times as a child and which Jennifer says is one of her favourite places in the entire world.
Many of its sites are named after serious people, like Captain Cook and Queen Elizabeth, and serious concepts — The Commonwealth! But lift the end of the carpet a little and you discover that a place that was built for government can at the same time set the scene for a thriving creative underbelly.
“You might not know this but all the bands used to rehearse in the tunnel in Commonwealth Park, did you know that? Jennifer asks. I didn’t. “There was this tunnel in the park that had power points, so every band used to play down there and there were always people watching.
There were also all these amazing music venues on Garema Place like Café Jaxx and Manhattan. We always used to go dancing at Manhattan, it was the best club on earth. Our other favourite place was Club Asmara, which was just around the corner and run by Ethiopians, so the whole vibe was Ethiopian and pan-Africa. This is how long ago it was — the last song would always be “Free Nelson Mandela”.
And that wasn’t even everything.
“Have you heard of Splinters? Splinters were actually incredible. They were a sort of immersive theatre group that was started by an old friend of mine, Patrick Troy. To see a Splinters performance, you would have to row a boat into the lake onto one of the little islands which they would have taken over and there would be fire and smoke and fog. Otherwise, it would be in some abandoned building somewhere or in the Brickworks. It was absolutely amazing.”
The thing with both Jennifer and I is that neither of us has lived in Canberra for decades. She came over to London in the 90s and I left when I was 10 in 2005. When we visit Canberra now, it’s for quieter purposes — Jennifer works with the National Gallery of Australia, hosting their Artists’ Artists podcast and editing The Annual, while I go back for Christmases and weddings and we both spend time with family.
We are so fond of our shared hometown, but that fondness exists at a distance, which took us to a point in our conversation where we wondered what the young people are doing in Canberra now. Luckily for me, my cousin Jamie drums for a hardcore band called Thantu Thikha, so it wasn’t hard to find answers to our questions.
“I guess the scene isn’t as big as it was in the 80’s and 90’s,“ he tells me, “but it’s still pretty good. There are some good venues like The Basement and Pot Belly, but one of them, Sideway, which is a really good one, just closed down. We played a show there like a month ago, so it was one of the last shows there.”
The weekend before my call with Jamie, I was at my friend Courtney’s Pride party in Wimbledon. She’s also from Canberra, so standing in her kitchen surrounded by models and polyamorous quadruples, I asked her if she had any thoughts on how the creative scene was doing these days. Sideway closing was the first thing she mentioned.
“Sideway was kind of an electronic music, live music spot that had lots of international and national acts come through it. They were a huge part of the community and it was a go-to place for dance and live music, so it’s devastating that they’ve closed.”
Jennifer puts the incredible time in the 80s and 90s down to Canberra’s modest size, the Art School and University, and the fact that it was cheap at the time. Canberra is growing but it’s still pretty small. The Art School and ANU are going strong. But Canberra certainly isn’t cheap anymore. Rising costs mean venue closures, and Australia’s general obsession with rule-keeping means finding new ways to creatively connect.
“The DIY scene is really big, especially in hardcore,” Jamie explains. “We’ve played a lot of house shows that Mrat, the singer of my band, has put on. He puts on all these house shows and they are really good. A lot of them are in Northside and people can just walk there, go to the shows, then walk home. That’s been going off in Canberra recently.”
Canberra’s inner suburbs are quiet and leafy, with small houses on big plots with front yards and back gardens. I love the image of hoards of metalheads sauntering through these residential streets to mosh in someone’s garage, so I spoke to Jamie’s frontman Mrat to paint a fuller picture.
Mrat started going to shows with his friend Caleb in 2022. He was 17 at the time, Caleb was 18, and the fact that his younger friends could never come to the shows started to bother him.
“That really spurred me to start booking house shows so everyone could get involved,” he explained over a series of Instagram voice notes. “A lot of it had to do with the sort of city Canberra is — it’s really small, so we only have a couple of venues, which is a really difficult thing to deal with, especially since we’ve just had one shut down. We’ve had no all-ages venues for a while, so no youth centres or anything like that, it’s pretty much all bars.
To find a workaround, Mrat looked at the history of Canberra hardcore, the alternative scene, and Institutions like Lacklustre Records. “They have a very special place in my heart because my science teacher from year 7, Jordan Leekspin runs Lacklustre Records and he was doing similar things when he was younger. Knowing this history and that Canberra could do those kinds of things, I felt like I had to start putting on DIY house shows with as many bands as I could get so that people could see them for cheap and so that it’s accessible for all ages. From the beginning that’s been the most important thing.”
Using Instagram — and sometimes email, which surprised me — Mrat gets in touch with bands, finds dates, figures out whose house to use, and reaches out to his network for everything from amps and drum kits to microphones, lighting, and powerboards. “I’ll be reaching out to people who have nothing to do with the show, asking if I can borrow this or that, and everyone really comes together and helps me out which is the greatest thing ever.”
In terms of the bands themselves, his friends are in a lot of them. Otherwise, they are bands that he has really wanted to see. “It’s a beautiful thing on the night,” he tells me. “More than just being any old band, it’s my friends’ band, we’re all gathered together, and everyone that I love is here to enjoy it”.
The shows also provide a platform for other creatives, like local artists and people selling clothes, jewellery, and zines. “There is a lot of space and freedom for photographers and videographers too,” Mrat explains. “It’s not just a space for musical expression, it’s open to so many different forms of artistry. Even in the bands, there are so many multi-disciplinary people, and that ability to do multiple things is reflected in the people who come to the shows and get involved.”
Chatting with Jamie and Mrat, I see so many parallels between their experience and Jennifer’s. Years pass, venues close, but the blood keeps pumping through Canberra’s creative heart and the kids are still out there making lots of noise. So while the Bush Capital may remain misunderstood by those who don’t care to look, if you dig a little deeper, you’ll always find something good. And doesn’t that make it kind of exciting?
See you in the next one,
Annabel x
So so so good
This reminds me of my relationship to my hometown (Minneapolis, MN) -- which also had an incredible music scene in the 80's/90/s/'00s (most famously, Prince is from Minneapolis and used to drop of paper flyers for same-day house concerts at Paisley Park at a local record store). Similarly a kind of boring-on-the-outside city with a great subcultural scene that flourished with low cost of living and is now gentrifying. And similarly, your piece mirrored how my own personal mythology of my hometown has flourished in the distance between leaving almost 15 years ago and now only coming back for visits/remembering my teenage years romping around.