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!