“Canberra thinks you’re boring,” reads the souvenir fridge magnet sitting coolly in my palm. I’m in a small local shop in the Australian capital, looking for a birthday gift to send my friend Aoife in Dublin. As old friends, we mostly send one another deliberately stupid gifts.
I like to send her Australian things with no practical use. A plush echidna toy, just because it’s the weirdest little toupée-esque animal I’ve seen over here, or a pair of koala socks no self-respecting woman in her 30s would willingly leave the house in.
I’m holding the “Canberra thinks you’re boring” magnet and considering whether such a daft piece of local ephemera is a good gift. I decide against it – you need to spend a day in this odd city to understand why it’s a place that sells souvenirs ironically referencing its own reputation for being incredibly boring. The reputation is not undeserved, and yet it is incomplete. I feel an immense sense of gratitude to live here.
Consider this a love letter to a boring city. Canberra is a place largely unheard of outside Australia. Most people in Ireland seem to believe that Sydney is the capital, and that makes sense. To the muttering resentment of Melbourne, Sydney is the heart of Australia’s international reputation. A vital, beautiful and exciting metropolis. It’s historically and culturally rich and, well, Canberra just isn’t.
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The capital is the prosaic inland home to fewer than half a million people. There are no beaches. There’s very little old or storied architecture. The post-meaning public art has the sort of modern, secular incomprehensibility that happens when it’s trying above all not to offend or exclude anybody, so it has no real sense of place or time.
Almost everyone seems to work for either the government or the military, or in some adjacent industry because these people, of course, need sandwiches and washing machine repairs and solicitors and gyms. Diplomats, journalists and civil servants flitter in and out of the city on a predictable rotation, giving it a transient feeling that can make it difficult to make new friends. This place was purpose-built and feels like it.
There is an artificiality to Canberra that is unlike any organically evolved city I’ve spent time in. Everything is planned, rigid, augmented right down to the fixed annual schedule of government-endorsed fun. You set your calendar by these events. The multicultural festival in February. Floriade – the horticultural festival – in the spring. Living here can have a Groundhog Day quality.
Canberra reminds me in one way of my native Limerick, in that locals frequently complain of its shortcomings among themselves, but also understandably deeply resent outsiders and blow-ins doing the same. There, however, the similarities end. In 2025, the Oxford Economics Global Cities Index named the Canberra the best city in the world for quality of life. This reputation is entirely justified. People who dismiss Canberra do so without appreciating what an unusual place it is.
Much of the feeling of decline in American and European cities centres on them feeling dirty, unsafe, overcrowded and underserved. It’s normal in Dublin to queue round the corner and compete with a crowd to secure an overpriced, mouldy rental flat. If your phone is stolen on a London street, people will scoff at you for having walked around with it in your hand.
In New York, it’s just considered obvious that you shouldn’t take your children on the subway if you don’t want them exposed to people with serious mental health issues behaving unpredictably. Modern life in major cities is navigating around problems that we all agree shouldn’t be an issue. We should have decent housing access, safe streets, an adequate network of care for the seriously mentally ill.
Australia’s distance from the rest of the western World can leave Australians unaware of the reality of life for many people in, say, Europe or the US. Life here is generally cheaper, easier, safer and more respectful of leisure and family time than it is across much of Europe or the US. It isn’t a cultural hub or fast-moving place, but that comes with costs as well as benefits. Canberra is homely, solid and slow. This might be the dream for those exhausted by the pace of cities that are grindingly hard to simply live in.
You can sit at a restaurant table in Canberra without anyone whooshing you out after an hour, and your dinner will cost half as much as it would in Dublin. It will generally be twice the size, and excellent. The streets are wide and most things are a maximum of 30 minutes from wherever you’re standing.
Canberra is the most convenient and functional city I have ever lived in. It may indeed be (quite) unexciting, but young people are able to start their lives, move out of their parents’ house and rent. Local businesses post “staff wanted” notices in their windows and young Australians can get a part-time job to help them through third-level education if they need to.
The city is comparatively safe and green, and the predictable calendar of government-sponsored fun is mostly oriented around events that kids can take part in and benefit from. When I was in London last year – much as I love that city and value its rapid pace and exciting cultural blend – I skipped over human waste on my way into a tube station to go and meet a friend for coffee. That’s another thing Canberrans don’t do – skip. They’re never rushing anywhere. Rushing is for people with a low quality of life.
“It’s a backwater!” one Irish man I know scoffed at me when I was home in Dublin last year. “Yeah,” I replied. “How long is your daily commute again?” I asked him. He went slightly purple. In a time of such perceived instability in cities around the world, Canberra is a place which perhaps suffers at worst from an excess of the opposite. All things considered, boring is not such a bad problem to have.
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