{"id":23342,"date":"2013-12-15T09:22:51","date_gmt":"2013-12-15T14:22:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=23342"},"modified":"2013-12-15T09:22:51","modified_gmt":"2013-12-15T14:22:51","slug":"qotd-choosing-a-capital-city-australian-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/12\/15\/qotd-choosing-a-capital-city-australian-style\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Choosing a capital city, Australian style"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Australia [&#8230;] set up a special city just for the national capital. Keep them all in one place, it avoids spreading the contamination.<\/p>\n<p>Partly that&#8217;s due to our settlement pattern. Mostly, each state capital is the oldest city in that state, the first point of European settlement. It&#8217;s also the largest city in the state (and, to be horribly honest, most other &#8216;cities&#8217; in each state are really &#8216;regional centres&#8217;, the state capital is pretty much the only show in town.)<\/p>\n<p>So when the states federated to form a nation, there was of course a fight to host the capital. Sydney was the obvious one &mdash; the oldest and largest city. Melbourne wanted it because it&#8217;s like that irritating little sister who always wants what her big sister has, and the other cities &mdash; well, nobody really cared about them anyway.<\/p>\n<p>So, in a wonderful stroke of compromise, they chose a site that is roughly equidistant from Sydney and Melbourne (and set in some of the most boring countryside available). They held a worldwide competition to design the city &mdash; Walter Burley Griffin won. Lord knows what lost. It&#8217;s a clever plan designed for maximum confusion, condemning some hapless visitors to spending the rest of their lives endlessly circling but never arriving at their destination.<\/p>\n<p>But, as I say, at least it keeps the federal pollies well away from everyone else. Always a plus. <\/p>\n<p>Gwynne Powell, posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold Mailing list (<a href=\"http:\/\/lists.herald.co.uk\/cgi-bin\/mailman\/listinfo\/lois-bujold\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/lists.herald.co.uk\/cgi-bin\/mailman\/listinfo\/lois-bujold<\/a>), 2013-12-13<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Australia [&#8230;] set up a special city just for the national capital. Keep them all in one place, it avoids spreading the contamination. Partly that&#8217;s due to our settlement pattern. Mostly, each state capital is the oldest city in that state, the first point of European settlement. It&#8217;s also the largest city in the state [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[331,7,57,53,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-australia","category-history","category-humour","category-politics","category-quotations"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-64u","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23342"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23343,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23342\/revisions\/23343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}