Light and hope in Canberra; grudging pomp in Westminster
‘W elcome,’ smiled the man at the security checkpoint. ‘Do you think my belt will set off the alarm?’ I asked.
‘It might. Walk though and give it a try. We’ll see soon enough,’ he said pleasantly.
The afternoon light slanted through the white marble pillars. This was Parliament House in Canberra on a crisp, sunny August afternoon late in the Australian winter. I cast my thoughts halfway round the world to a darker and grumpier place.
Westminster. They do not offer much of a welcome in the portable security huts now assembled outside the St Stephen’s entrance to the Palace of Westminster. Members of the public wishing to visit the Houses of Parliament, from the moment they brave the maze of ugly steel pedestrian barriers which usher you (if you can find the right gap) to the checkpoint, are made to feel like impertinent petitioners for an extraordinary privilege. The access is pompous and grudging. Everything about the place is pompous and grudging.
Not that the security in Canberra was any less tight. After Bali, Australians too feel themselves to be a potential terrorist target, and their precautions are as thorough as ours. It’s just that from the moment we drove up the Capital Hill last Saturday after a pleasant lunch at the 1920s modernist Hotel Canberra, and, seeing a guard by the roadside, asked (purely on spec) if it was possible to visit the Parliament, and he replied, ‘You certainly can’, and directed us, I had felt, along with the scores of other visitors we soon joined, like an invited guest. Visitors to Westminster feel intimidated. Visitors to Canberra don’t.
Enlightened efforts are now under way at Westminster to make the Palace friendlier to visitors, and one should not disparage these. There’s plenty to do and see, some good exhibits and some experienced guides. But the whole ambience of the building is crushingly self-important, selfreverential, stale and false. It’s not as if it were actually very old. Apart from Westminster Hall, the Palace wasn’t born much earlier than my great-grandmother. Canberra will celebrate its first century as the seat of Australian government before the present Palace of Westminster celebrates its second.
But the present Parliament House in Canberra is very new. The great central door was unlocked by the Queen in 1988. And ‘unlocked’ is as surely the mood of the place as ‘closed’ is the mood at Westminster. I found myself quite taken aback by how much I liked it. It comes as a shock to British sensibilities like mine to see how a sense of stature and dignity can be achieved without cobwebs, gargoyles or ivy.
The entire building is filled with light. From the flagstaff which crowns the roof a delicate steel frame like a giant fourpoled tepee lifting the staff high into the sky — to the beautiful foyer (my favourite), a lobby whose high white ceiling is supported on 48 grey-green marble pillars like a forest of eucalyptus trees, the visitor is uplifted rather than oppressed by the scale. Parliament House welcomed nearly two million visitors in the first year after its inauguration (there was a steady stream on the afternoon I went there) and few leave except with a lighter tread than they arrive.
The same expansiveness inhabits the debating chambers. They are high and light and simple. The wood used everywhere is smooth, not over-carved or ornate. The Senate is upholstered in the pinks and dry russets of the Australian desert and scrub; the House of Representatives in the blueygreens and greys of the forests; and perhaps you think all this sounds a bit precious, but it does not feel like that. It feels like a legislature and a people showing delight and respect for what is rather than what was.
And for what will be, too. Tony Blair’s almost reflexive recourse to the language of renaissance and redemption (and his disregard for history and tradition) has been much mocked, not least by the likes of me, and we should not desist from the attack, because due process matters and the Blairite ‘new Britain’ has proved more fatuous with every passing year. But in the airy architectural optimism of the Australian Parliament — in the idea that the future, no less than the past, can be infused with something we might call grace — I did feel a kind of thrill which is absent from the heavy gases which hang around the Palace of Westminster, with its fevered braggadocio, its low corridors, cramped rooms, ghastly Pugin decor, vile, smelly carpets, and wallpaper which shouts at you.
I did sense something of the political ideal for which Blairite words, if not deeds, were reaching. I wondered whether the young Tony’s parents’ emigration to Australia when he was a small boy (though it proved short-lived, as did my own parents’ emigration to South Africa) tells us something about the spirit of his family. There was something good in that, I think, which perhaps is better understood by those of us whose family history or childhood experience includes the hopes of empire.
The empire has come to nothing but the hope lives on in Australia, in a new incarnation. I do understand the antipodean wish to dump the past, and I begin to see that it isn’t the same thing as trying to deny the past: it’s a matter of getting the tense right. It is the past.
The new Parliament House in Canberra made my spirits soar. Soar from what? Memories of 20 years in the Commons, and all that weight of custom and practice, and the stale air and the fussy architecture (designed to make you feel like a rat in a splendid labyrinth), which would be splendid long after you and anything you tried to do were forgotten.
I chanced to meet an old former parliamentary colleague on a train in the Midlands the other day and we talked about the old times in the old place. ‘I hadn’t realised until I got out,’ he said, ‘how ugly it all looks from outside.’ Looking back at Britain from Canberra, I felt the same.
Whenever I write about Australia in The Spectator or the Times I get disgruntled letters from Australians calling me — in so many words — a snide Pom. There is plenty here to be snide about, but at root I’m beginning to think that it’s shallow to call Australia shallow. This is really a strange, subtle and tangled place, tortured in its spirit but redeemed by light, space and hope. I saw in the architecture of Parliament House in Canberra what inspires me about Australia; as I see in the Palace of Westminster what oppresses me about Britain.
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