About the Canberra Thirty Years Project

During 2016 I was scanning my mother's photos and I scanned one taken of my brother and myself at the Canberra Times Fountain in Civic.  It was taken while we were on a family holiday to Canberra in 1986. Most of the Canberra Centre didn't exist yet, instead there was a road and a carpark and a clear view to Mt Ainslie.  It completely freaked me out because of the dramatic change to Canberra in thirty years.  I had the idea that it would be cool to retake as many of the photos as I could from that holiday, and compare the differences in Canberra over thirty years.

We came down to Canberra on the afternoon of Monday 1 September 1986.  We had two full days in Canberra, then a day trip to Thredbo, followed by one more morning in Canberra.  We crammed a lot into those few days!  

It was hard work trying to recreate the trip.  I wanted to take the photos as close as possible to the original time of year (early September) to make the photos be exactly thirty years apart.  Some things were season-dependant, such as cherry blossoms and deciduous trees springing to life which also meant doing them at the same time of year.  I also wanted to get the lighting as much the same as possible which meant the time of day was important as well. And some things, like the train at Weston Park I thought would only run on weekends, so that had to be factored in.  The next problem was the weather - it rained a lot in early September! Lake Burley Griffin is brown due to flooding from heavy rains.  And finally I had to fit it all around work.  I didn't take any days off but I did take a few long lunches (including one day where I had a six hour lunch :) ).

Because of all of that, I didn't do things in the most efficient way possible.  I had to cram things in "out of order" from the original trip, which meant a lot of inefficient driving back and forth to the different locations.  So the most expensive part of the whole project was petrol.  I know I used up an entire tank of petrol driving around.  The next most expensive thing was Cockington Green ($19.50), followed by Telstra Tower ($7.50, but they very nicely allowed me a second entry so I could go up again that night without having to pay again).  I only had to pay for parking twice - $3 at the Botanic Gardens and I think about $6 for a couple of hours in Civic on a weekday. Even around the parliamentary triangle they still have some free parking (one hour) so that was good, same at the National Capital Exhibition, and I was at the western end of the lake for such a short time that I got away with not having to pay there.  I did have trouble at the Carillon one of the days as there simply wasn't any parking available.  I took a disabled spot (there were still plenty of those) and left a note saying I'd only be a few minutes (which was true).  I didn't go down to Threbo though, I figured that was out of scope.

Oh I also discovered that when dad scanned all his slides back in 2002, he didn't actually scan every slide - he only scanned a bit over half of them.  The scanner he used was pretty bad as well, so I rescanned all three boxes of his slides.  My scanner actually did a pretty good job with them and it didn't take much longer than scanning prints.  The biggest problem with dad's slides is that he didn't store them in chronological order, which annoys me ;)  Fortunately I could figure out the itinerary from mum's photos, which have the roll and frame number on them, so it's easy to determine the order of things. Sadly mum's prints have reddened over the years so the colour balance between old and new is pretty awful. I colour corrected to try and even things up a bit, but it's not perfect.

I took twelve hundred photos replicating about one hundred and sixty photos taken by the parents.  Some of those were for my own benefit though, not for the project :)

The following is a recreation of the holiday, in cronological order of the holiday in 1986.  

Enjoy!