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Canberra occupies a peculiar and fascinating position in Australian life. It exists because Sydney and Melbourne could not agree on which of them deserved to be the nation's capital, and so a purpose-built city was planted in the tablelands of New South Wales, far enough from both rivals to satisfy neither. That origin story, settled by federation compromise in 1908, shapes everything about the place: the wide ceremonial avenues, the artificial lake named after the American landscape architect Walter Burley Griffin who designed much of the city, the concentration of national institutions that would feel overwhelming in a place twice the size. Canberra is not trying to be a Sydney or a Melbourne. It is doing something else entirely.

The city's geography rewards those who take it on its own terms. Lake Burley Griffin sits at the centre, with the parliamentary triangle to its south and the commercial and cultural districts of Civic and Braddon to its north. The Australian War Memorial anchors the northern lakeshore with a gravity that stops most visitors in their tracks, its domed hall framing a direct sightline across the water to Parliament House on Capital Hill. That axis is one of the great pieces of civic planning in the southern hemisphere, and walking it on a clear morning, when the Brindabella Ranges are visible to the west, gives a sense of the ambition behind the whole enterprise.