Australian Capital Territory
Discover Australian Capital Territory
Introduction
The Australian Capital Territory exists because Sydney and Melbourne could not agree which of them should be the capital. The compromise, written into the constitution, was a new city in New South Wales but not of it, at least 100 miles from Sydney — and the Territory was excised from the state in 1911 to hold it.
It is small, about 2,350 square kilometres, and mostly not city at all: Canberra occupies the northern third, and Namadgi National Park covers nearly half the rest in mountain bushland.
The city itself was designed from nothing by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, who won an international competition in 1912 with a plan of geometric axes around an artificial lake. It is one of very few purpose-built capitals anywhere that was actually built close to its original design.
Nearly every national institution is here, and most of them are free.