A century on from a major milestone, has Canberra achieved its aim?

The meeting was held at an old sheep station in the suburb of Yarralumla, which is today known as Government House. One-hundred years on, the now meticulously planned city of Canberra is held in high regard globally for its aesthetically pleasing design and functional effectiveness.

However, questions remain about whether the capital has succeeded in the less tangible aspects its shapers intended, namely the creation of a city that reflects the soul and taste of Australia.

While the occasion was not met with a great deal of public enthusiasm, the first cabinet meetings in Canberra represented a pivotal shift in our nation.

Canberra had been announced as the site of Australia's new capital over a decade earlier, yet little progress had been made on its development due to the First World War and several bureaucratic failings, which culminated in a royal commission on federal capital administration in 1916.

At the time, the site of the future forum of the nation was described as "nothing but a line of trenches brimmed with tentative bricks." To use a modern metaphor, this cabinet meeting marked the time when the federal executive stopped working from home and came into the office.

What's more, they rolled up their sleeves and sought to forge a path forward for the development of our nation's very own purpose-built capital city.

The initial cabinet meeting was chaired by the then-treasurer Earle Page while prime minister Stanley Bruce was overseas.

High on the meeting's agenda was resolving the problems that had hindered the development of Canberra to date. Over two days, the cabinet determined the terms and conditions of land ownership within the federal city area, took steps to ensure construction activities would enable the next Commonwealth Parliament to sit in Canberra (which it did) and even the question of a site for religious purposes was considered.

Following the meetings, Dr Page outlined his vision for the city, stating the cabinet "trust and believe that Canberra will be the keystone of the federal arch and become the soul of a truly Australian sentiment".

A similar aspiration imbued the 1903 royal commission on the sites for the seat of government of the commonwealth which envisioned the city would be "the mirror of the nation's taste".

Despite its early travails, which were followed by further delays due to the Great Depression and the Second World War, Canberra is now fully developed and has achieved many of the practical objectives for which it was set out. The initial requirements, as dictated by the constitution, were that the site had to be situated in NSW, at least 100 miles from Sydney.

The site was expected to be an inland location to alleviate the risk of amphibious invasion and disease, while also possessing a colder climate, plentiful supply of water and a high degree of natural beauty, all of which has been maintained by Canberra to the present day.

On the other hand, whether a city represents the soul and taste of a nation is harder to define. In 2016, not long after the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development had ranked Canberra as the world's best place to live, longstanding Queensland MP and Canberra frequenter Bob Katter described the nation's capital as a "very soulless place".

The challenge with modern, planned capital cities such as Canberra is they go against the fundamentally human experiment cities represent. Canberra's natural beauty and striking built form are undeniable but a city is more than the sum of its natural and built environment.

What helps to nurture a city's "soul" and integrate it into the wider nation's zeitgeist is an organic, trial and error that is tested incrementally over multiple generations, as opposed to a top-down game of SimCity.

Canberra's current alignment with the Australian psyche was brought into question at last year's Voice referendum when all states, the Northern Territory and 60.1 per cent of the nation voted against the proposed alteration to the Constitution, while 61.3 per cent of Canberrans were in favour.

USA's planned capital of Washington, DC has manifested a similar dissonance with former president Ronald Reagan winning 49 out of 50 US States in the 1984 Presidential election while only achieving 13.7 per cent of the vote in Washington, DC. In 2020, President Joe Biden won Washington, DC with 92.2 per cent of the vote compared to his nationwide tally of 51.3 per cent.

Nonetheless, voting patterns are certainly not the be-all and end-all of gauging a city's soul. The evolution of a city is a long-term process and 100 years of history still places Canberra in a relatively youthful tier of capital cities. The sites of prominent global capitals such as Athens, Beijing, London and Rome have vast historical dimensions that have endured for thousands of years with contrasting periods of conflict, peace, disaster, triumph, poverty and prosperity.

I am proud of our capital and how it stands as a symbol of our nation's success as a liberal democracy. Whether Canberra will live up to the expectation of mirroring the nation's taste and reflecting the soul of a truly Australian sentiment is an ongoing debate that will ultimately depend on how Australians engage with the city created for all of us.

In her seminal text on The Death and Life of Great American Cities, legendary urbanist Jane Jacobs emphasised this condition, advancing: "Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody."