'Roos on the Loose!

I've got a bunch of stories and pictures from my (amazing!) trip to Sydney last weekend which I promise I'll post soon. But now, for something completely different...

Yesterday, I went with K. and A. and some of their friends down to Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve just south of Canberra for a barbeque and some hiking. And I finally saw some Australian wildlife! To wit, kangaroos and emus:
It was about time, too. Inevitably, in conversation with Australians (and others, like the philosophy graduate students who've been here for a while even if they're transplanted from Europe or New Zealand), people always ask me whether I've seen a kangaroo yet. And they'd always be shocked when I told them that, no, I hadn't. Apparently, because of the drought, the kangaroos have been creeping in closer and closer and have started dining at night on the cricket ovals in various parts of Canberra. So I was feeling really embarrassed not to have seen one yet. Now, I can say that I have in fact seen a kangaroo.

Tidbinbilla has one of the highest concentrations of kangaroos in all of southeastern Australia, and as we were heading back to our car later in the afternoon, we were treated to a spectacle of an entire mob of kangaroos out grazing on a field:
Wildlife aside, the landscape in Tidbinbilla is generally beautiful: a sort of austere pastoral wonderland. Tidbinbilla was basically burned over during the bush fires 4-5 years ago, which left it with some great old gum-tree skeletons:
The wide-open horizons aren't too shabby, either:

A Report from the National Library, and Then Some

Back again, and I've got some more pictures from around town. I'll start out with this shot, taken just down the road from my apartment, which features both the leafy broad streets of Canberra and (in the background) the Testra Tower, one of the most notable features of the city. I suspect it's the tallest structure in town, and it looks over the city from a perch high on Mount Black. Because it's omnipresent, it's a great orienting device when you get lost on the twisty roads. (Telstra, incidentally, used to be the national, government-run telephone service, but was privatized during the 1990s. Australia has been on something of a privatization binge during the past decade.) Anyway, Telstra operates the tower, which you can climb up (I haven't yet). Telstra also runs nationalistic TV ads attacking their rival, Optus, for being a predatory Singaporean company. I bought my Optus sim card before I learned of their nefariousness, though my week-long ordeal getting my phone credits up and running suggests that there may be some truth to the ad.

I took the rest of these pictures on my way home from the National Library of Australia. Honestly, the Library is pretty much amazing. It has the most user-friendly (and comprehensive) electronic catalog I've ever had the pleasure of using. It has the largest collection in the Southern Hemisphere, as I learned today. It also has some amazingly gregarious patrons, including one 60ish lady who invited me to a Salvation Army party at the end of October, which you better believe I am going to attend. Even the architecture is, by Canberra standards, very stylish:

The inside is even nicer, with stained glass in the lobby and a sleek glass-enclosed cafe.

I've been spending most of my time this week at the Library digging up old government documents, obscure conference reports, and the like. The real find so far has been a 1969, state-issued book of Scripture readings for primary students (a.k.a. elementary schoolchildren) replete with chapter and verse. It's nothing out of the ordinary--nothing you wouldn't expect to see at a Sunday School, for instance--except for the government imprint. Such is my lot these days: getting excited over children's books from 40 years ago.

The other neat thing I found was a collection of New South Wales primary curriculum guides from 1925, 1952, 1959, 1970, and 1975. (There's one from 1941 that I'll need to get in Sydney when I travel there one of these weekends.) Unlike the U.S., where curriculum decisions are made at the local level, here curriculum standards are determined at the state level, so you get a uniformity that is unheard of in America. (It makes the research job much easier, too!) Anyway--though this has nothing directly to do with my research--the difference between the 1970 and the 1975 guides is pretty outstanding. It's as if the Department of Education suddenly got taken over by a hostile band of developmental psychologists. All of the curricula through 1970 were very structured, subject-focused (English, mathematics, social studies, etc.), and full of recommended readings for each grade level. In 1975, the entire syllabus is almost pure theory: filled with very broad statements about the goals of education, child psychology, and almost entirely content-free. It's an amazing, and amazingly abrupt, shift. The funniest part is that, in 1977, the New South Wales Department of Education also issued a booklet entitled Aims of Elementary Education, which, upon opening, is essentially written in the style of a children's book, with lots of pictures of smiling kids, about twenty words of text per page, and really big pages. Yet this is presumably aimed at an adult audience. It's entirely bizarre.

The walk back to my place is long: around 45 minutes. Normally I take the bus, but today was not too cold and I was feeling like the exercise. The Library is on the south side of Lake Burley Griffin, which divides the northern, commercial, center of Canberra from the southern, governmental, center. The lake was created by damming a muddy creek, so swimming is "not recommended" according to the guidebooks. When I asked roomies K. and A. about the idea, they laughed in shock and said, "Are you crazy?" Which I guess means the guidebook authors were being polite. In any event, to get home I have to cross the long bridge across the lake, which gave me the chance to take a set of shots of the lake just before sundown:

(I'm experimenting with composite, panoramic shots this week. If you like them, I'll try to do more now that I've figured out how to do them on my primitive photo software.)

In the shot, the inescapable Telstra Tower is on Mount Black to the right. Center, the arch is part of the National Museum, which is just below ANU, and which is supposed to be terrific. I'm hoping to get there this weekend. My house would be somewhere at the very far right of the picture.

On the way into town, here is a view of Canberra's central business district as you approach it from the national capitol:

I think I told someone that Canberra is kind of like if you took downtown Madison and plopped it in the middle of the suburbs, and I think this picture captures that pretty well. The downtown is decidedly low-rise. There is a big circular, essentially decorative roundabout at the end of the bridge, around which downtown Canberra wraps, which makes the city feel yet further spread out. So, downtown is what it is, which is, alas, far less exciting than government-issued Scripture readers from 1969.

Well, that's almost enough for now, but I'll leave you with this: I learned, last night, as K. threw an impromptu dinner party (A. is at a training in Kuala Lumpur for two weeks), that Canberra is apparently renowned for its pornography. According to the dinner party guests, the Australian Capital Territory's biggest export for years was pine trees. When the city was being built, they planted huge pine forests all around it to serve as a commodity. Most of those forests burned a couple of years ago (apparently, pine needles don't decompose well in Australia) during bush fire season. So now, I am told, Canberra's biggest export is now porn. I am further told that, if I go to the Fyshwick neighborhood, I can see all manner of strip clubs and brothels (prostitution is legal here, too) and "studios." I fear K. now has it in his head to take me to Fyshwick to see the sex shows. Stay tuned...

First Pictures from Canberra

I've finally gotten around to taking some pictures of my daily routine in Canberra, so here they are for your enjoyment:

This picture is of the O'Connor Shops, hard by my apartment (you can see the apartment complex immediately behind the shopping complex if you squint really hard). Canberra is an exceedingly spread-out city (thank you, Garden City movement) made up of dozens of "suburbs," each with a little commercial district at its center. Apart from the commercial district, the rest of the suburb is, well, suburban: lots of large lots and lawns and parks and absolutely nothing to do. I suppose I'm fortunate in that the O'Connor Shops contain All Bar Nun, one of the best bars in town, plus a little overpriced grocery store, a great fish-and-chips shop, and a decent Vietnamese restaurant. But it would be nice if there were more to do at close range. Well, maybe once things warm up in a month or so I'll be able to venture further on my new used bike.

The rest of these pictures are pictures of the Australian National University Campus, about a 15 minute walk/ 5 minute bike ride from my apartment. (Sorry, I took them all at dusk on my way to a lecture, so they're a bit dark.) This is the main entrance to the campus that I pass by every day on my way into campus. The university (or, as the perpetually-abbreviating Australians say, "Uni") is actually a hybrid of two colleges, one a research-only campus and the other an undergraduate teaching college. This means that an appointment in the research school means no teaching responsibilities. Sweet deal, eh? The Social and Political Theory Program resides in the research school, which means that the faculty are available pretty much all the time, and make regular appearances at morning and afternoon teas (an innovation that American universities could certainly stand to import).

Much like UC-Berkeley, ANU has a creek running through the center of it. Much unlike Berkeley, the creek is not surrounded by beautiful redwood groves, but rather by large willow trees and grassy lawns. (If you've noticed a strong British influence on the university so far, you win!) When I first arrived, everything was pretty much dead and brown, but it's greening up bit by bit as spring approaches. If this picture is any indication, I'm sure it will be quite lovely and pastoral come October. Like the rest of Canberra, the campus is spread out and garden-like to a ridiculous degree, which means that it's a good ten minutes from the main gate to my office (see below).

This picture shows the Student Union, which contains a number of restaurants, shops, and a bar. The bookstore (not pictured) is across the street. Earlier in the week, this plaza was mobbed with students handing out pamphlets for the elections for student government. I got a kick out of telling them I wasn't eligible to vote, and watching them look confused. One of the shops on the ground floor is a bakery which sells an astounding array of meat pies. At A$3 a pie, they're one of the only bargain lunches around, incredible delicious, and extremely unhealthy. So I eat there pretty much all the time.

This is Chifley Library, the main library for the campus. It's a fairly small library compared to Berkeley's Doe Library, but they apparently keep a remarkable amount of stuff from before 1990 in reserve storage someplace in New South Wales. This can be frustrating for the researcher trying to track down back issues of Melbourne Studies in Education or Victorian Historical Review, but it gives the library a nice -- surprise! -- spaciousness. The librarians are very friendly, by the way. One of them invited me to join her film club after I asked her whether it was possible to view tables of contents of journals otherwise on reserve storage in the bowels of the Outback. (The answer was no.)

This lovely building is the Coombs Building, home of the Research School of Social Sciences, and home to me when I'm working on campus. The building is designed -- I'm not kidding about this -- in the shape of an organic molecule, with three interlocking hexagonal sections. Offices are numbered, as a result, based on section of the building, floor, and office number. As you might imagine, this is incredibly confusing. To make matters worse, the architects decided to design it so that the floors in the various sections don't align with one another. So the entire building is a patchwork of half-staircases and blind turns and irrational numbering. Oh, and it's also under construction so as to make it accessible to the disabled, which as you might imagine means essentially tearing the whole building apart; this only adds to the chaos of trying to find your way around.

I was feeling awful that I kept getting lost until last Monday, when I went to a meeting with a professor. He took me downstairs to introduce me to some colleagues in economics, and even he got lost along the way. And he's been here for upwards of twenty years! Really, what can I say: modernist architecture 1, humans 0. On the plus side, there's an awful lot of money sloshing around in this building, and I've got a fantastic office with two pretty cool European philosophy students (one studying political philosophy, the other the philosophy of mind), so it's all good once I find my way to my office...

Finally, we come to one of the newer (and cooler) buildings on campus: the Medical Research Building. For some reason, the lecture I went to see on religion, tolerance, and terrorism was held in the lecture hall in this building. The lecture wasn't so hot, but the building was pretty great. (And the lecture room was very nice, too.)

So, there, in a nutshell, is a guided tour of my daily walk to work. Now that I've finally finished up those American hangover papers, I'll be around here more frequently, at least for the next couple weeks before I shift over to the National Archives and National Library during the week. I biked over to the government section of town this afternoon, but didn't take any pictures. But never fear, once I do, I'll post them here for you to admire. Until then!