Red Hill, Canberra: its walking tracks, scar trees and ochre earth underfoot will always transport me | Paul Daley

Would I like to write about my favorite place?

The invitation inspired me to conjure up so many magical places – from north-east Arnhem Land to Mediterranean island hamlets with their idyllic quayside taverns, from the Melbourne Cricket Ground on the big last day to Dickens’s London pubs, from postcard villages beneath snow-capped Alpine peaks to the haunts of my literary giants and up to Joshua Tree and Hagia Sofia.

In the end, however, I returned to an Australian place where I have probably wandered more than any other. I don’t go there regularly anymore. I don’t even live in the same city. However, it is on the heights of Canberra’s Red Hill, with its walking paths, its scarred trees and its ocher earth underfoot, that my memory never ceases to transport me. The place remains as vivid in my memories as if I still visited it daily.

As someone who became a parent at a relatively young age and has lived much of my life with dogs in tow, it is perhaps not unusual that my connections to different places feel strongest where my memories are seeded with children and canine family.

And it brings me inexorably back to Red Hill, from whose summit one can gaze upon the ghostly face of the geometrically designed (but never realized) Griffin Town on the limestone plains, with its monuments (the National Library, the War Memorial, the National Museum, the art and portrait galleries) symbolizing a federation born of noble ideals – not the cold steel and cordite that forged the nation elsewhere.

I thought about all this every time I went there, every week when I worked for many years as a reporter in Parliament (with all its Darwinian ambition, its malevolence and the reason I reluctantly moved to the city), and daily after I was released to write about a wider world.

As a much younger person, Canberra – landlocked in the bush and ostracized by the rest of the country – became an unlikely physical, intellectual and emotional sanctuary for this dedicated urban Melburnian.

Some who move there will still dislike the city due to its relative tranquility. Complain about its rarity, its apparent unfinished nature. Australians, largely coastal city dwellers, have long mythologized their connection with the bush. But the truth is that for most of us, the bush – with its rugged expanses, its creatures, its lonely oddballs, its all-consuming silence – is terribly foreign.

The bush capital is, as its name suggests, a landlocked city planted with urban forests and surrounded by plains of trees and grasslands – a broad connotation of the mythologized place with which Australians wrongly claim such affinity. And yet, tell strangers you live there, and many have no problem blithely invading the place in a way they wouldn’t dare in another city.

For me, once I broke the loneliness, and especially once I started another family, the calm and the bush became a balm. Meditative. Creatively inspiring.

I used to do my best on Red Hill by trudging up those steep, hot trails in the sleet or under a blazing sun with cerulean blue skies that you only get in the mountains, the Labradors intoxicated by the scent of roosters and foxes and rabbits, blue tongues and brown snakes, eagles circling cautiously in the updrafts above, ready to swoop on unleashed miniature dogs. Stories of big birds and little dogs – and all dogs versus snakes – up there are legion.

Our most extraordinary dog, Nari – a black lab with the stamina, intelligence and demeanor of a collie – is long dead. I still miss her a lot. But daily she lives up there on the hill in my mind, reveling in the wind, the pouring rain or the searing heat, reveling in the bucolic pleasures of a dog’s life lived on the edge of the bush.

The puppy, Ronda, a shiny raven black – more reticent than her adoptive mother – died at 13 just before Christmas, after spending her peaceful final months lounging comfortably and listening to classical music in Sydney. My fondest and most lasting memories include his discussions of the ancient eucalyptus trees and the big rocky hills up there, stopped short by boxes of eastern gray kangaroos and howling gangs. Dogs, I find, are such poignant markers of our times here.

Best of all, Red Hill was also a playground for our three children.

The two youngest were carried up there by my partner while still in utero, ripe and ready to arrive, the youngest just a day before she was born.

Then we regularly take them up there, babies strapped to our chests in pouches, their infant faces with closed eyes raised toward the elements, the wind ruffling their hair. As children, they would hike the hill with us to learn about snakes, insects and birds. Later, they would disappear up there for hours with their comrades doing… well, we still don’t really know.

This place – both prosaic and so special – is the scene of so many of my happiest and most poignant memories. And what is a favorite place if not a place built on our fondest memories?