Canberra Perfectly Summed Up By Five Star Hotel And Abandoned Flats Beside One Another

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

Northbourne Avenue is our nation’s capital is a place on the move, according to property developers and speculators alike.

For generations, foreign dignitaries and their staff have arrived in Canberra and taken a trip up and down what should be one of the grandest boulevards in the southern hemisphere. Instead, we have a cheap congaline of shitbox apartments, abandoned buildings, two-to-five star hotels and somewhere warm for students to trade STIs.

An example of this sits on the edge of Civic, deep in the heart of cosmopolitan Braddon, where you have the five-star Midnight Hotel that sits beside a block abandoned flats that have people coming and going at all hours of the day and night.

Our reporter, who found themselves waiting for a taxi outside the Midnight Hotel at 2:44am this morning, was approached by a resident of the abandoned apartments over the road and asked for some of their grey-market Chinese cigarettes.

After giving them the last five Double Happiness King Size lung lollies, the man remarked that this was ‘Canberra manifest’.

“You got cunce like you staying in a place like this and then you got cunce like me sleeping on the floor in a place like that,” he said, gesturing at the abandoned buildings.

Our reporter nodded.

“Instead, like, imagine, like, what the King thought when he got driven down here to check out the new light rail. We would’ve been like, ‘Fuck me, where the fuck am I?’ like he would’ve been used to driving down The Mall and getting waved at by cunce on the street n that but like, he gets driven down Northbourne in a converted Commodore and he looks out to see me chopping the end off some cunce garden hose with a steak knife I’ve knicked from Bentspoke to fashion myself a bong with the Gatorade bottle I knicked from the BP up the street,” he added.

“Fucken crazy town.”

More to come.