Canberra
From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Canberra is the capital city of Australia. There are 320 200 people who live there. It doesn’t belong to a state but it is in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT).
Canberra was started in 1913 and in the middle of the city is Lake Burley-Griffin . This lake was created especially for the city. There was a competition to design the new capital of Australia. The competition was won by an architect from Chicago in the United States of America. His name was Walter Burley Griffin. Griffin designed his triangular town as a garden town, so its size expanded over a big area. But as Canberra grew larger and larger, the lake was no longer in the middle of the town, but the people who are in charge of planning the city make sure Canberra is as close to Griffin's original plan as possible. Canberra has a size nearly as big as Berlin, but the number of people who live there is much smaller.
Before Canberra was founded, Australia’s two most important cities, Sydney and Melbourne, were arguing which city should be the capital of the continent. First Melbourne was elected the capital, but in 1908 there was a vote. The result: an area of 2400 square kilometers was given to the country by New South Wales to build Canberra in. This was the place, 300 kilometers away from Sydney and with a distance of 650 kilometers to Melbourne, where a few years later Canberra was built.
Canberra is an Aboriginal name which means "Meeting point" and you can say it in many different ways. Some people say "CAN-bruh" a few use "CAN-buh-ruh" and a small number of people pronounce it "can-BEAR-ruh"; all three forms are correct. Canberra is very interesting for tourists because it has many national monuments and other famous sights. Some places to visit are the Government House, Parliament House , the High Court of Australia, the Australian War Memorial, the National Gallery of Australia, Telstra Tower, the National Library of Australia, and the National Museum of Australia.
