I heard a rumour. So of course I had to investigate. Image: AI generated.
We’ve always been told it means ‘meeting place’.
But I recently heard a vicious (and delicious) rumour that ‘Canberra’ could refer to a very specific kind of meeting place: the place between two breasts.
A local historian I ran into at Riverside Plaza told me that the name Canberra, my dear friends, could, in fact, mean ‘cleavage’.
You can imagine the look on my face.
And so, being the investigative powerhouse that I am, I closed Tinder for an hour and set about researching this rumour on my phone.
I landed on a book written in 1927 by Canberra’s flamboyant “Founding Father”, journalist and historian John Gale, entitled Canberra: history of and legends relating to the Federal Capital Territory of the Commonwealth of Australia …
And, on page 13, there it was.
Could this be Canberra’s very beautiful right breast? Photo: Michelle Kroll.
Gale wrote that he had tried “for many years” to discover the English meaning of Canberra, but local Aboriginal people had been reluctant to translate their place names for Europeans.
Gale got his answer at a funeral at Lanyon (how Canberra is that?!), when Bungendore clergyman Canon Champion pulled Gale aside and told him he’d met an elderly swagman who had once lived at Canberra. The swagman claimed to have learned the meaning directly from local Aboriginal people.
The English equivalent of Canberra, he said, was “a woman’s breasts”.
Mount Ainslie and Black Hill (now Black Mountain) were the breasts; with the flat land separating them known as Canberra.
Gale loved it.
“It not only struck me as being supremely poetic, but also singularly appropriate to the site chosen as the mother city of the Australian Commonwealth,” he wrote.
And now, I love it.
The anatomy of Canberra
City Hill roundabout makes a very convenient belly button. Photo: ACT Government.
If Mount Ainslie and Black Mountain are the breasts, what are the other key locations on the “body” of Canberra?
The entire inner north is located squarely in the cleavage, from Reid to Turner and O’Connor. Her face would land somewhere between Kaleen and Mitchell (yikes) and the City Hill roundabout makes a very convenient belly button.
One foot lands squarely in Bonython, and the other over the border in Tralee.
(I only point these things out because they’re hilarious.)
What if we truly leaned into this meaning?
The marketer in me goes straight to tourism. Imagine the absolute field day Visit Canberra could have.
Canberra: Australia’s Cleavage.
We could sell beautiful gold and silver Canberra necklaces designed to sit right above the cleavage. T-shirts with a minimalist outline of Black Mountain and Mount Ainslie. Tote bags saying Naturally Well-Endowed (well, from many perspectives, we are).
I need one of these tote bags stat. Photo: Google Gemini.
A walking trail between the two mountains. A signature Canberra cocktail served with two perfectly positioned garnishes.
Visit Canberra could run billboards saying ‘You’ve been looking at Canberra wrong’ with an image of our mountains in a bikini top.
For decades we’ve been trying to convince Australia that Canberra’s exciting. Meanwhile, John Gale may have handed us the greatest tourism campaign in Australian history almost 100 years ago.
Of course, beneath all the fun is something much older: a name given to this place by Aboriginal people long before Canberra became a capital city.
Whatever the exact meaning of Canberra, I love the idea that it came from looking at the landscape itself and seeing something “supremely poetic”.
