Canberra Comet
Jan. 21st, 2007 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skyring"Been in Canberra long, driver?"
That's one of the usual conversation starters, and so long as it doesn't follow some horrendous navigational error on my part, it's always a good beginning, because we can talk about Canberra and how different it is to other cities, I can get the pssenger talking about how they first came to live here, and how they learned to deal with the weather.
It's a fact of life here that almost every Canberran over a certain age was born elsewhere, and moved to Canberra during the great expansion of the city beginning in the Sixties. Whole suburbs were planned, built and populated in a matter of months. My wife and I moved down twenty years ago, and apart from a few years away when we became a Navy family and were posted to Melbourne and Sydney, we've been here ever since.
We did the Canberra thing of arriving, buying a house and starting a family, and although we didn't settle in one of the newest suburbs, we certainly felt for those who did. Canberra's southernmost town of Tuggeranong was referred to as "Nappy Valley" for many years, and when we arrived in Canberra, they were still only halfway done building the place. Gowrie and Macarthur were outer suburbs, and the town centre hadn't even been built. It was all dirt roads and sheep paddocks, and people joked of taking a cut lunch if they had to travel down to "North Cooma".
It was early 1986 when I gained a promotion in the Commonwealth Public Service and moved down from Brisbane to become a junior computer programmer in the Department of Defence. My wife, heavily pregnant with our first child, flew down, and I drove our car. I took the Newell Highway south from Goondiwindi, driving along the deserted road through the night. Somewhere near Coonabarabran, where the sky was clear and dark, I got out and stretched my legs beside the highway, looking up to see if I could catch my first glimpse of Halley's Comet, then making an overhyped visit to our neighbourhood.
And there it was, high in the Milky Way, a faint star with a definite tail. Nothing at all like its dramatic appearance in 1910, when the Earth had actually passed through the comet's tail. This time around you had to know where in the sky to look for it - it wasn't a "Great Comet" that stopped people in their tracks just from the blazing magnificence of the sight.
But I was pleased to have seen such a famous comet, and I thought deep thoughts about how its transit marked a passage in my own life, a total change of life from Brisbane to Canberra and into parenthood. I wondered how it would appear next time around, when my as yet unborn child would be 75 years old, and I likely wouldn't be on hand to witness the event.
Last night I was down in Tuggeranong, in a suburb that hadn't even been a gleam in a town planner's eye in 1986, when a news radio program mentioned Comet McNaught, the Great Comet of 2007. "Look at the sunset, wait half an hour, and you should see it above where the sun went down," we were told. I glanced over that way, and almost ran off the road. Woodcock Road, it was, about as far south and west as you could get in Canberra, with no houses or roads between me and the Brindabellas. There, hanging in the clear evening sky, was an unmistakable Great Comet, tail streaming, curving and fading up into the heavens. Sweet Glory, what a sight!
I picked up my next fare and casually observed, "That's a bright comet you've got over there." He glanced out of the window and nearly levitated clear out of his seat. "Wow!" he said, "That is seriously amazing!"
He kept his nose pressed to the window as we drove in to the Tuggeranong Town Centre, now a bustling hub of shopping malls, office blocks and nightclubs. I dropped him off outside one of the latter and headed off to the bottom end of Athlon Drive, where I could try for a time exposure photograph without too much light pollution.
The photograph above is the result, my camera balanced on a fence post for a fifteen second exposure, streetlights behind me lighting up the horse paddock, and the Brindabellas forming a dark wall along the horizon.
Perhaps it was an appropriate time to reflect on how the turns of my life brought me to this point. Heaven knows that when I was young, I would never have thought that I would end up as a cabbie in Canberra. Yet here I am, driving people through the night. And loving it!
That's one of the usual conversation starters, and so long as it doesn't follow some horrendous navigational error on my part, it's always a good beginning, because we can talk about Canberra and how different it is to other cities, I can get the pssenger talking about how they first came to live here, and how they learned to deal with the weather.
It's a fact of life here that almost every Canberran over a certain age was born elsewhere, and moved to Canberra during the great expansion of the city beginning in the Sixties. Whole suburbs were planned, built and populated in a matter of months. My wife and I moved down twenty years ago, and apart from a few years away when we became a Navy family and were posted to Melbourne and Sydney, we've been here ever since.
We did the Canberra thing of arriving, buying a house and starting a family, and although we didn't settle in one of the newest suburbs, we certainly felt for those who did. Canberra's southernmost town of Tuggeranong was referred to as "Nappy Valley" for many years, and when we arrived in Canberra, they were still only halfway done building the place. Gowrie and Macarthur were outer suburbs, and the town centre hadn't even been built. It was all dirt roads and sheep paddocks, and people joked of taking a cut lunch if they had to travel down to "North Cooma".
It was early 1986 when I gained a promotion in the Commonwealth Public Service and moved down from Brisbane to become a junior computer programmer in the Department of Defence. My wife, heavily pregnant with our first child, flew down, and I drove our car. I took the Newell Highway south from Goondiwindi, driving along the deserted road through the night. Somewhere near Coonabarabran, where the sky was clear and dark, I got out and stretched my legs beside the highway, looking up to see if I could catch my first glimpse of Halley's Comet, then making an overhyped visit to our neighbourhood.
And there it was, high in the Milky Way, a faint star with a definite tail. Nothing at all like its dramatic appearance in 1910, when the Earth had actually passed through the comet's tail. This time around you had to know where in the sky to look for it - it wasn't a "Great Comet" that stopped people in their tracks just from the blazing magnificence of the sight.
But I was pleased to have seen such a famous comet, and I thought deep thoughts about how its transit marked a passage in my own life, a total change of life from Brisbane to Canberra and into parenthood. I wondered how it would appear next time around, when my as yet unborn child would be 75 years old, and I likely wouldn't be on hand to witness the event.
Last night I was down in Tuggeranong, in a suburb that hadn't even been a gleam in a town planner's eye in 1986, when a news radio program mentioned Comet McNaught, the Great Comet of 2007. "Look at the sunset, wait half an hour, and you should see it above where the sun went down," we were told. I glanced over that way, and almost ran off the road. Woodcock Road, it was, about as far south and west as you could get in Canberra, with no houses or roads between me and the Brindabellas. There, hanging in the clear evening sky, was an unmistakable Great Comet, tail streaming, curving and fading up into the heavens. Sweet Glory, what a sight!
I picked up my next fare and casually observed, "That's a bright comet you've got over there." He glanced out of the window and nearly levitated clear out of his seat. "Wow!" he said, "That is seriously amazing!"
He kept his nose pressed to the window as we drove in to the Tuggeranong Town Centre, now a bustling hub of shopping malls, office blocks and nightclubs. I dropped him off outside one of the latter and headed off to the bottom end of Athlon Drive, where I could try for a time exposure photograph without too much light pollution.
The photograph above is the result, my camera balanced on a fence post for a fifteen second exposure, streetlights behind me lighting up the horse paddock, and the Brindabellas forming a dark wall along the horizon.
Perhaps it was an appropriate time to reflect on how the turns of my life brought me to this point. Heaven knows that when I was young, I would never have thought that I would end up as a cabbie in Canberra. Yet here I am, driving people through the night. And loving it!
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Date: 2007-01-21 02:05 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2007-01-21 07:56 pm (UTC)I was in my last year of high school in 1986, and a total astronomy geek. Dad and I got up stupidly early one morning and went out into the hills to look at Halley's comet - it was wonderful through binoculars, a fuzzy blob otherwise.
I did get to see Hale-Bopp when I was living in the UK, though. That was pretty impressive.
^ ^
00
=+=
v
FutureCat with fingers crossed for a clear night one day soon
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Date: 2007-01-21 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2007-01-22 07:59 pm (UTC)I should have mentioned that if you are over twenty five in Canberra, you likely came from somewhere else. If under, then the chances are you're a native.
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Date: 2007-01-22 08:47 pm (UTC)Must see if I can get something like that. The wind on Mt Ainslie was making for a fair bit of vibration, so even my 15 sec exposures were fuzzy. Not to mention the wife complaining about the cold and wanting to go home before it was proper dark.