PRIMAL SCREAMS

If Canberra, as capital, had presided over the nation until the crisis of the Whitlam government with the increasing if never unchallenged authority of central government, after 1975 it was equally implicated in the new course Australia took, in which governmental power and role were ever more closely scrutinised. Not only that, but the ‘laboratory’ the capital presented, in which a brave new world of Australian life might be envisaged, became instead a purgatory in which a community, especially one so advantaged, was required to adjust to the end of the boom that had underpinned its existence. That shift heightened the politics of a city that until then had functioned largely in the domain of policy. From 1975 until the late 1980s when, still largely against their will, Canberra’s citizens were plunged into the responsibility of governing themselves, the city’s story centred on finding a way between the comforts of the past and the stringencies to come.

In 1980, in the midst of this reorientation, Ian Fraser – recently appointed director of the Canberra and South East Region Environment Centre (CSEREC) – published a ‘walker’s guide’ to the city. A community-based group formed in 1974, the Centre was energised by big conservation debates: woodchipping, uranium and ‘no dams’ on Tasmania’s Franklin River. When it came to local issues, however, such as a chairlift proposed to the telecommunications tower on Black Mountain, CSEREC wrestled with a disenfranchisement from the schemes of politicians and bureaucrats. Fraser was aware of the surge of dissent in the Canberra community: a theatre group, for example, neighbouring his office in a decommissioned hostel, ran ‘all-day, all-week rehearsals featuring primal screams’ – though they sometimes asked him to ‘quieten down’ the fervent ‘gestetnering’ that went with building his constituency. He sought an equivalent way of connecting a widespread concern about the state of the world with the strains already evident in the urban fabric around them.