Four days in Canberra: a city invented to settle an argument

The war memorial is the most visited building in the country and the least like what the name suggests. It is a memorial, with a courtyard of bronze panels listing a hundred and three thousand names and a hall of remembrance at the end, and it is also a very large museum of Australian military history, with aircraft, dioramas and a submarine's midget attack craft raised from Sydney Harbour. Entry is free and four hours is a conservative estimate.

Stay until closing. Every afternoon before the doors shut there is a Last Post ceremony in the courtyard, in which one name from the roll is read out and their story told, then the bugle. It takes twenty minutes and it is the reason to plan the day around the end of it rather than the start.

Then drive up Mount Ainslie behind the building. The road climbs through eucalypt scrub to a lookout that sits precisely on Griffin's land axis, so the view runs straight down Anzac Parade, over the lake, across the old parliament and up to the flagpole on the new one. Every argument about whether Canberra works is settled from up there, and the answer is that it does, if you are standing in exactly the right place.

If you have the legs, the walking track up from the memorial car park takes about forty minutes.

Australia has two parliament houses within four hundred metres of each other, and the pair of them make one very good day.

Start at the old one, which opened in 1927 as a temporary building and was still in use in 1988. It has been left as it was: the prime minister's office with its 1970s furniture, the cabinet room, the party rooms, the whips' offices, the two small chambers where a country was run for sixty years. It is now a museum of Australian democracy and it does not flinch from the bad parts. The building is also where the Aboriginal Tent Embassy has stood on the lawn since 1972.

Then walk up the hill to the new one, which was built into the hill rather than on top of it and opened in 1988 with a flagpole eighty one metres tall over the top. Free guided tours run several times a day, the public galleries above both chambers are open when parliament is sitting, and a lift takes you to a roof terrace with the view back down the axis you saw from Mount Ainslie yesterday, from the other end.

Finish at the national science centre by the water, which is aimed squarely at children and defeats most adults' resolve within ten minutes. There is a slide you free fall down.

Canberra is a bush capital, which means the paddocks start about ten minutes past the last roundabout, and the best day here goes out into them.

Forty five minutes south west, in a valley chosen because the surrounding hills screen out radio noise, is one of three tracking stations that NASA operates around the world to talk to spacecraft in deep space. The dishes are up to seventy metres across, they are usually turning, and what they are pointed at is genuinely a long way away. The site has a visitor centre with a piece of the Moon in it, though it has had closures in recent years, so check before you drive out. Even from the fence, the scale of the things is the point.

The nature reserve is on the same road. It is a valley of open woodland and wetland where you can see eastern grey kangaroos in numbers, koalas in the trees, emus, and a colony of brush-tailed rock wallabies. Go early or late: in the middle of a hot day nothing moves.

On the way back, stop at the observatory on the ridge above the western suburbs. It was Australia's premier optical observatory until the firestorm of January 2003 came over the hill and destroyed five telescopes, the workshop and the director's house in an afternoon. Some of it was rebuilt and reopened in 2004; the burnt shells of the rest were left standing, and walking among them is unsettling in a way a plaque could not manage.

The last morning belongs on the lake's southern shore, where two galleries sit two minutes apart.

The National Gallery of Australia is free, large and much better than its brutalist exterior suggests. The First Nations collection is the strongest anywhere and is given the entrance hall rather than a side room. There is also Monet, Pollock's Blue Poles, which the country argued about for a decade after it was bought in 1973, and a sculpture garden open all hours where the best piece is a fog installation that switches on several times a day.

Next door, the portrait gallery hangs about four hundred Australians, arranged by era, in every medium from oil to photograph to a sculpture made of dust. It is the fastest way to learn who the country thinks it is, and it takes about an hour.

Then the airport is fifteen minutes away, which is the other quiet advantage of a city built on a paddock.