Does PM Malcolm Turnbull have rainwater tanks at his newsworthy harbourside mansion?
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
As Canberra gasps and as its gardens wither in this ghastly heat your columnist, a passionate and compassionate gardener, is giving thanks for his four rainwater tanks. They adorn our Hindmarsh Driveside cottage in Lower Garran.
![Fyn 4, Marlow, 3, and Noah Butler, 6, beating the heat in Lake Burley Griffin before the school holidays end. Photo: Jay Cronan Fyn 4, Marlow, 3, and Noah Butler, 6, beating the heat in Lake Burley Griffin before the school holidays end. Photo: Jay Cronan](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/ebc601fe-0a1d-4156-bba6-7db258f99963/r0_0_2000_1330_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Back to the challenges of a brutal Canberra summer in just a moment. First though a reminder that in parliament on Wednesday Labor's Bill Shorten used the "harbourside mansion" jibe against the PM once too often. The PM turned on Shorten with a now famous tirade that one day political historians will point to as the highlight of his, Turnbull's, otherwise underachieving prime ministership.
I dare say many habitually Labor-voting Canberrans shared my conflicting emotions over Wednesday's tongue-thrashing.
Hell will freeze before I ever vote Liberal and the spectacle of a Liberal PM humiliating a Labor leader really ought to horrify. And yet, some of us are confiding, the PM's virtuoso spray was exhilarating and was full of home truths ("What a hypocrite!") about Shorten's slithery, two-faced, polecat unpleasantness. I yearn to vote Labor again, but how long O Lord must we wait for another Labor leader we can love, admire and respect? When, Lord, will you bestow upon us our next Gough?
But back to baking Canberra and to this sobering thought. If the Canberra site had been inspected on furnace-like summer days like this week's Friday and Saturday (40 degrees!) then surely the federal capital city would have been built somewhere else.
Starting in 1902 posses of federal pollies went out looking at the many sites suggested for the federal capital city. The impression a site made on its crucial guests owed something to what the weather was like on the special day.
The weather-unluckiest site of all was highly-qualified Albury. Alas the 1902 day Senators went to see it (150 years ago almost to this very day) was a day of hellish heat.
The senators were appalled.
"A temperature approximating to the Black Hole of Calcutta," one complained.
"Nice place for a federal cemetery," another senator gasped.
"Hot as a stokehole," another panted.
Melbourne's Punch ran a cartoon The Shrivelled Senators that showed the sweating statesmen being greeted at hellish Albury by Satan himself, Hell's lord mayor.
Albury's chances never recovered from this setback, just as Canberra's chances would never have recovered from its being assessed by shrivelled statesmen on days like Friday and Saturday.
But as it happened, with everyone in search of a site with a "bracing" climate, posses of pollies descended on the Canberra site on perfect days (in August of 1906 and in August 1907) of sparkling, frosty-crisp, bracing, site-flattering weather. The visitors were captivated and the Canberra site's prospects never looked back.
Critics of the Canberra site accused that it was so desert-like and waterless that not so much as a single cabbage would ever be grown there.
In recent times and with Canberra burned to a kind of wan beige and with withered cabbages galore giving up the ghost I've been reminded of those grim forecasts.
Gardening is always portrayed as a blissful, green and lovely, relaxing and uplifting activity but this is a mild, dewy English idea. Gardening in these sometimes scorching colonies is not relaxing at all but is a matter (exciting and character-building in its way) of life and death high drama.
At blistering times like these my gardens' hundreds of plants seem like hundreds of patients. In my wild erratic fancy I am not a common suburban gardener but flat-out Florence Nightingale with an enormous ward of patients always on the brink of death by dehydration. Florence was famously The Lady With The Lamp flitting from bedside to bedside to give succour to her poor boys. And in this Canberra weather I am The Bloke With The Bucket, hurrying from rainwater tank to gasping grevillea to wilting westringia to panting prostanthera.