Neither urban nor rural, city nor country town, Canberra is a place on the way to other places. For Tabitha Carvan, though, it’s a place to call home.
LIKE seemingly everyone who moves to Canberra, we figured we might as well give it a go for a couple of years. “And 10 years later, we’re still here!” That’s what everyone then says 10 years later. Us, too.
My husband, Nathan, had been offered a job in the public service and I was six months pregnant. In life’s game of musical chairs, we were caught between seats, hovering, bum in the air, in that moment when the days of your carefree youth are over but you don’t yet fully live in the world of grown-up responsibility. It’s a funny period, when you truly believe you’ll just be able to take the baby with you to a jazz bar.
Nathan and I had no connection to Canberra, aside from fond memories of Questacon on that one school trip everyone takes, but it felt right for us at this in-between time of our lives. Canberra is an in-between kind of place. Its very existence is defined by being neither Sydney nor Melbourne, but somewhere between the two; some other third thing.
