Ian Warden | If Sydney is the only place to truly live, then is Canberra just glamping?

I am spending some good times in Sydney these days, as ever finding that city excitingly eventful and glamorous and a place of thrills.

Yes, some of those thrills are the sorts of cheap ones, frivolous metrothrills that all gigantic and throbbing cities supply (although I no longer scorn cheap thrills, think they have had a bad press, and feel governments should fund a level of cheap thrilling in all of our lives).

Meanwhile though some of Sydney's everyday thrills are profoundly fine, life-enriching and soul-stoking. A thinking Canberran, I never visit swaggering and wicked Sydney without comparing and contrasting it with my own shy, chaste, little metropolis and (for the unexamined life is not worth living) without wondering what Canberra is and who and what Canberrans are.

Here at once, before tangoing on with this theme, I know that the Sydney in which I am doing most of my visiting and gambolling is the privileged, harbour-hugging, inner-city Sydney. Life in Sydney's far flung suburbia cannot be quite so full a bowl of cherries.

Meanwhile I stay in increasingly gentrified (but still quite cosmopolitan and raggle-taggle) Woolloomooloo, beside the harbour and within easy strolling distance of lots of the great city's metrogorgeousness and metroglamour.

So for example one day last weekend my hosts and I walked from our Woolloomooloo maison through the sub-tropical boscage of the Botanical Gardens to the Sydney Opera House for the deep thrill of a performance of Handel's Messiah.

Then, afterwards, we retraced those same harbourside, boscage-enriched steps (albeit doing as much skipping and floating as walking this time, for that is the spiritual magic the Messiah imparts to all sensitive people who experience it) as we went Woolloomooloowards on our way home.

Nearby, out on the turquoise waters of the harbour, ferries, yachts, pleasure vessels of all kinds surged to and fro in a picturesque frenzy and the sight of them did the heart a power of good.

What uses Sydney and frolic-loving Sydneysiders would put a megalake like Lake Burley Griffin to while Canberrans, inhibited, puritanical, tightly-corseted, pleasure-suppressing people, by regulation never subject the lake to the atrocity of anything motor driven lest it upset the NIMBYs of Yarralumla and keep the platypuses awake.

These days after my three-or-four days' immersion in Sydney and its pulsating Sydneyness I find the quick rocketing home to Canberra (I do it by rocketing, bustling charabanc in just over three hours) quite unnerving.

The two cities are such different planets and so, rocketed, one is far too quickly uprooted from Sydney's teeming, bustling wondrousness and plonked down in the quiet and dull garden (where the disturbingly few people are vastly outnumbered by trees) that is Canberra.

It is a kind of bewildering jetlag in which one's body is delivered to its destination far, far ahead of one's still Sydney-ensconced mind. One feels, landing in a rush in civically sterile Canberra after the superabundant jungle of Sydney, like one of those seeds that in the Bible's parables falls "on stony ground" and so is destined to only become a withered thing.

Some of the shock has to do with the journey's sharp exchange of the pulse-quickening thrill of the spectacle of Sydney's CBD skyline (where every big building is an individual with some characterful stuff to strut) for the pulse-deadening experience of Canberra's CBD where squat, apologetic, chaste and sensible buildings with no personality whatsoever huddle sheepishly together in concrete flocks.

My Sydney-Canberra experiences reinforce my theory that Canberra is in so many ways shaped, governed and run by people who live here because they don't like real cities.

They, the city's movers and shakers and influencers and its average citizens are people with a phobic dislike of crowds and noise and smells and surprises and who thus actively work to keep their Canberra as uncitylike as possible.

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They want and get from their governors a kind of manageable petite Wagga-Wagga albeit a first world Wagga-Wagga bristling with a federal capital city's sophisticated facilities, with no drive to anywhere for one's perfect cup of coffee ever taking more than 15 minutes and with, when one gets there, a superabundance of places to park one's Porsche SUV or Tesla EV.

For Canberrans not being able to find a parking place the instant one seeks one is, because Canberrans are so first-worldly soft and plump and privileged, a catastrophe, an injustice, the fault of a government.

My dear metrosexual Sydney friends by contrast love the extreme-in-the-eastern-suburbs challenge of looking for a parking spot. Their brains neuroplastically expanded by necessity, they show an uncanny ability (not unlike a Wedge-tailed eagle's evolved ability to spot a rat from a great distance) to see skinny parking places the underevolved Canberra driver would never see.

Then, engagingly, at last finding a parking place, the inner-Sydney driver feels and shows the grateful joy of a battling miner who has found a nugget of gold. Canberra motorist-parkers, ingrates, never know this joy.

In my theory, then, Sydney and Canberra are such different cities not just for the obvious reasons of disparity of size. No, it is also because Canberra is paradoxically a city of people who shudder at the thought of living in a (true) city and who have instead chosen to not so much camp (in Paul Keating's famous aphorism) as to graze and glamp in this plush, quiet, unexciting federal capital encampment.