(diaryland) August 21, 2005 - 11:30 p.m.

I just went to Canberra for three-ish days. How I got there was I jumped onto a tiny plane that had propellors on it and went through the sky and then some people told us to get off and we ran across a deep black void until we reached a deep brown void and that was Canberra.

I always get amazed at how puny and empty our nation's capital is. There are no buildings, no cars, no shops and no people. There are a hell of a lot of roads, though. No footpaths; just roads. Lots of roundabouts too, which are handy just in case you do encounter another car by some strange twist of fate. Apart from that, there's just a whole lot of brown grass and a few tree stumps here and there.

Apart from the fact that Canberra has less stuff in it than an abandoned hamlet, I did manage to do a couple of things. I saw the national sculpture prize which had a lot of silly sculptures, some good ones, and one excellent one, that was made out of zillions of money notes folded up into little shirts and strung into a huge 3d grid with a big hole in the middle.

You had to see it, OK? It actually won first prize.

I also liked the one that was a team of small bronze buddhas that said, 'om,' all the time. They were cute.

The other thing I saw was a Bill Viola exhibition, which I like more the more I think about it, mostly because I keep forgetting all about the crappy 'paintings' and only remember the good ones.

Anyway, good or bad, all the exhibits were panels of what could be described as very slowly-moving photographs, many of which were pseudo-religious things. I liked those the most. Some of the others were things like people standing around throwing very slow tantrums in pools of water, etc.

My favourite was Emergence. That is all.