Australian Capital Territory
When they made Australia, it was decided that the capital city wouldn’t be Sydney or Melbourne. So they designed Canberra instead, to some success.
Unfortunately, basically no one who isn’t a politician, diplomat or bureaucrat lives here.
Canberra is famous for having the wildest temperature variations in the country, with lows of -3 degrees in winter and highs of 45 degrees in summer.
Tidbinbilla Deep Space Communications Complex
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One third of NASA’s Deep Space Network.
Built as a part of Project Apollo, it talks to the Voyager probes, any Pioneer probes that haven’t completely run down their batteries, whatever’s on Mars at the time.
Basically, anything that isn’t in Near-Earth Orbit
Telstra Tower
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It has a ludicrously expensive revolving restaurant and pretty good views of the entire town.
Parliament House
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One of the largest buildings going around, Parliament House is home to the Australian Parliament. Like many parliaments across the world, it inherited the red/green colour scheme of the Palace of Westminster, but they have been tastefully muted to the colours of ochre and eucalyptus respectively, so that’s a nice touch.
Parliament House was pretty much buried under the top of the hill it’s built on, the inventively named Capital Hill… This means that it is possible to roll down the side of the building, although experience shows that it’s a really big hill, and you’ll be really dizzy when you do get to the bottom…
The building has quite a lot of fairly interesting tidbits of Australian history scattered around, and some history of Canberra displays too. The Flag flying over this building is the size of a large bus.
Back in 2005, someone tried to ban the security guards at Parliament House from calling people “mate”. This lasted for all of one day.
Old Parliament House
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Also trades as the Museum of Australian Democracy, formerly known as Provisional Parliament House.
Basically, when they built Canberra back in the 20’s, they didn’t build a proper parliament building, in fact they were going to rip this one down when Parliament moved up the hill. After a public outcry, they decided to keep it and use it as a museum on how Government and Parliament work. This also led to a public outcry.
There’s just no pleasing people.
The museum covers things like the Westminster system of government and how British the Australian people saw themselves at the time of the construction of the building. They also hire the building out for period TV shows and movies. All in all, the building is very interesting, although extremely nerdy.
Australian War Memorial
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Often regarded as the only thing worth seeing in Canberra, the Australian War Memorial is the nation’s major war memorial.
Considered to be one of the most significant national war memorials in the world, the WW1 exhibit has been critically acclaimed since it opened during the 40’s.
The Memorial has one of the world’s largest collections of Victoria Crosses, and the baton of the country’s only Field Marshal amongst a lot of other memorabilia.