This picture is from the top of the “New” parliament building, with the “Old” parliament building immediately behind, and the War Museum in the distance (across the river and against the mountain).
Canberra is the capital of Australia. It’s a perfectly (or imperfectly, if you don’t know your way around) planned city with strange, concentric circular roads, and buildings lined up in a scenic way. It’s extremely clean, extremely green, with waterways and bike paths and wide roads – really livable. It’s a small city, so you can always see where you’re trying to go, but all the circular roads make it nearly impossible to see how to get there.
We only spent one night there, and we had time to quickly see all of the major attractions.
The first sight we went to was the War Memorial & Museum. It has a collection of memorials for different wars, leading to the main museum. The museum was much more than we were expecting, consisting of extremely well-done memorials & exhibits of the wars and battles that Australia has been involved in. I must say, I never really realized that they were such a military presence, but they certainly have been – they have made major commitments (and huge sacrifices) in both World Wars, as well as most of the wars that the U.S. has been involved in (including Vietnam and Korea).
There were 2 corridors of walls like this, with the names of all the Australian soldiers who have died in battle.
We learned a lot about the battle of Gallipoli. We heard about it while we were in Turkey, and then we learned a lot more in Australia – but I had never even heard about it before traveling. It was a huge battle in World War I (1915), where the losses where huge – (46,000 allied lives lost total; nearly 9,000 were Australians).
The museum had these dioramas of many important battles – What’s cool is that the displays are really accurate – I’ve never seen anything like it. The museum worked with historians, artists, and eye-witnesses and photographs (whenever possible) to make these intricate displays accurate – down to local vegetation and uniform details.
It was just really interesting to get another “history” of the wars from another non-European country, especially World War II – Australia joined before the U.S. did, possibly because they were so close to the Japan/Pacific side of things.
This is the “Old” Parliament house, built in 1927 – it’s now a museum:
And this strange one is the “New” Parliament house:
There’s me with another Christmas tree, in the lobby of the parliament house:
And here is the chamber where Parliament gathers:
This is a bell tower on the river:
Finally, we took a stroll outside of the National Art Gallery, fun sculptures…
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