AN ALERT COMMUNITY

In April 1945, in the last stages of World War II, the Sydney Morning Herald unkindly quipped that:

The slap was hard, but even that comparison – of London and Canberra – made a grudging point: the Australian capital had at least attained visibility, and bonds of its own. A year earlier, in a more generous account, Warren Denning, the ‘guru’ of the national press gallery during the tumultuous years since the Great Depression, argued that the demands of war had ‘hastened [Canberra’s] rise into national and international prestige’. It was a capital now ‘recognised as such by world powers and, in one sense more significantly, by our own people’. That recognition was due primarily to the fact that a global-scale conflict, and the mobilisation needed to meet it, had for the first time concentrated authority in Australia’s central government, and made the affairs of the federal parliament of dominating interest for many Australians. The first hurdle of national acceptance overcome, there remained the question of what further common interest could unify the city in itself.