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Podcast: Today In History with The Retrospectors
Episode: Yes, We Canberra
Description: What is Australia’s capital city? Not Sydney. Nor Melbourne. It’s Canberra: so named at an official ceremony on 12th March, 1913 - when the site was little more than grazing land for sheep.
But for this newly-federated nation, Canberra’s remote, inland location was a deliberate compromise to offset the rivalry between the country’s two largest cities. Sydney had long been the principal colonial centre, but Melbourne’s rapid expansion during the nineteenth-century gold rush made it an equally powerful contender. To avoid favouring either, Parliament decided their new capital was to be located...