While my friends and family celebrated Father’s Day months ago, I’m doing my gift-shopping now. The United States and the United Kingdom both honor dads in June, but Australia waits until early September. (Australia celebrates Mother’s Day in May like much of the world.) Different sources date the first celebration of Father’s Day in Australia to 1935 or 1936. An article from the Western Herald in 1964 dated the celebration to 1935 and explained that it was now officially designated as the first Sunday in September throughout the Commonwealth.   

Various theories explain why Australia celebrates Father’s Day in September. I call my two favorites the Empty Calendar Theory and the Retail Therapy Theory.

The Empty Calendar Theory

According to this theory, Australia’s spring calendar is too crowded. There’s the long weekend for Easter, ANZAC Day, and the Queen’s Birthday. There’s also Mother’s Day, Labour Day, and May Day.

Dads need their own space, so Australians wait until September to celebrate.

The Retail Therapy Theory

This is the retail version of the Empty Calendar Theory. Retailers prefer their holidays spaced out because consumers need some recovery time after all the spring holidays mentioned above.

Also, when Father’s Day falls in September, it’s at the beginning of spring Down Under. Retailers can market gifts for Dad like camping, fishing, and sporting equipment—all big sellers with the coming of warmer weather.

This year, we decided to embrace the Australian way of celebrating Father’s Day. Next year, my husband promised, he’s lobbying for celebrating both in June AND September.

Before moving overseas, I lived outside of Washington, D.C. My husband’s work brought us to the other side of the world to Canberra, another capital city. The two cities with a shared English heritage are more similar than I expected, and I soon felt at home in Australia’s capital. Here are five things Washington, D.C. and Canberra have in common.

They are both planned cities

Major Pierre L’Enfant submitted a grand design for the new U.S. capital to President Washington in 1791. His Baroque plan called for ceremonial spaces and grand radial avenues, lined with trees. Sites throughout the city would feature monuments and fountains.

Canberra held an international competition in 1911 to choose an architect to design the new capital. The winners were a pair of American architects: Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion Mahony Griffin. Their grand civic design was based on circles and rectangles joined by long avenues. It included parks and boulevards, public buildings, and monuments. The city was designed to fit within the natural landscape.

Neither city was built to match the designers’ original vision.

They are home to embassies and government buildings

Washington, D.C. has the Capitol and the White House, while Canberra has its spectacular Parliament. Both are dotted with embassies from all over the world although Canberrans are much more forgiving of foreign drivers.

They feature lots of green space

Nearly 20 percent of Washington, D.C. is parkland, and ample green space was part of L’Enfant’s vision for the capital. His original plan called for 15 large open spaces at the intersections of avenues. His plan was reworked in 1901 to add an improved public Mall, waterfront parks, and parkways.

The Griffins designed Canberra to be a planned garden city. More than 30 nature reserves in and around the capital incorporate native plants and animals. Because of that, Canberra’s nickname is the “bush capital.”

They both struggle with their reputations

Both cities gained the reputation for being boring, full of bureaucrats, and having no nightlife.

Both have responded by sponsoring annual festivals, becoming foody destinations, and nurturing lively theater scenes.

People come and go

Capital cities tend to have transient populations. The Washington metro area has one of the highest mobility rates in the United States at 14.2 percent. In two Virginia suburbs, about 1 in 5 households moved a year. 

The Australian Capital Territory (ACT), where Canberra is located, also has a transient population, the highest of any territory in Australia.

When I lived in D.C., a native-born Washingtonian was a rare animal. The same is true for a native Canberran.

One way they differ

Washington, D.C. has the sixth worst traffic in the country and ranks 15th for the worst traffic in the world. Commuters spend 61 hours in traffic congestion each year.

In contrast, Canberra doesn’t have much traffic at all. The city’s spacious highways are well-maintained. We live in one of the inner suburbs, and just about any destination is 15 minutes away by car. And rush hour is truly just an hour in the morning and evening. During rush hours, we allow about 15 extra minutes on certain highways to get to our destination.

I have really enjoyed having the opportunity to get to know both cities.

Canberra, the capital of Australia, is a planned city. The designers were two American architects selected in a worldwide competition. Although Canberra still reveres Walter Burley Griffin, history has overlooked the other half of the partnership: his wife Marion Mahony Griffin.

Marion Mahony was born in Chicago in 1871. She was the second woman to graduate in architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1894, making her one of the first licensed female architects in the world.

Beginning in 1895, Marion Mahony worked for Frank Lloyd Wright as part of the Prairie School architectural movement. She was his first employee and later one of seven draftsman who contributed to the style of architecture that made Wright famous. She is best known for her drawings and watercolor renderings of Wright’s designs. In 1910, a book of Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs was published in Germany, which became one of the most important publications about architecture in the last century and influenced Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. Mahony’s drawings, retraced in ink, made up more than half the book. When people see her drawings and watercolor renderings, they think of Frank Lloyd Wright, but the notoriously arrogant architect never gave her any credit for her work.

Marion Mahony married Walter Burley Griffin in 1911, another Prairie School architect she had met in Wright’s studio. She devoted herself to furthering her new husband’s career. She persuaded him to enter a competition for the design of Australia’s proposed capital city in Canberra. They collaborated on the entry, and Marion created 14 large presentation drawings of Walter’s design. Ironically, neither Marion nor Walter had ever seen Australia. Her drawings captured the imagination of the judges, and the couple won the competition.

In 1914, they moved to Canberra to oversee the building. After many bruising, bureaucratic battles over the new capital city, very little of their vision survived. Although only small parts of their original plan were implemented, the couple had other successful projects in Australia. Marion managed their Sydney office and did the designs for their private commissions. Their projects included five new towns, several suburban communities, three campus plans, houses, and some industrial and commercial buildings.

The couple also worked in India, where Walter designed a university library. After her husband died there in 1937, Marion returned to Australia and then to the United States. She continued working and was also known as a horticulturist, graphic designer, and painter. She remained an advocate for community planning and the environment until her death in 1961. In 2005, her paintings were published in the book Marion Mahony Griffin: Drawing the Form of Nature.

In Canberra, memorials to her husband Walter Burley Griffin are easy to find. The lake in the center of the city bears his name. His portrait is on a commemorative postage stamp.

Marion Mahony Griffin is more elusive. The National Archives of Australia exhibited her renderings in 2013 for Canberra’s centennial. That same year, a view from the summit of Mount Ainslie, the subject of her most evocative drawing, was named in her honor.

When I first heard that Australia didn’t have poison ivy, I was thrilled. Sure, I could blunder into venomous spiders and snakes while weeding the flowerbeds, but at least no noxious blisters, right? My excitement was short-lived. Australia, it turns out, has dangerous plants too. And not just dangerous in terms of ingestion, although the country has lots of those. For example, eating the orange-colored fruit from the strychnine tree will result in convulsions, paralysis, and death. However, the three plants I’m describing here are so poisonous that even a passing contact is dangerous.

The first is the giant stinging tree, or gympie gympie. The name comes from a town in Queensland called Gympie, and this member of the nettle family is common in Queensland and northeastern Australia. It’s a large shrub with stinging hairs. The hairs cover the entire plant and deliver a powerful neurotoxin when touched. One of the world’s deadliest plants, it can kill dogs, horses, and humans. An Australian Geographic article describes the pain of this sting “like being burnt with hot acid and electrocuted at the same time.”  

My daughter and I are both gleeful geeks about the long-running British TV series Doctor Who. When we moved to Canberra, we discovered that the Doctor has more connections to Australia than we imagined. Here are the top five:

1. Connections to Canberra include a TARDIS (utility box) and a local chapter of the Doctor Who Club of Australia that meets in Dickson.
   
2. The composer of the original theme music, Ron Grainer, was born in Queensland. Known for his scores for British television and film, Grainer composed the famous opening. Delia Darbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop then did the electronic arrangement of the piece.
   
3. In 1979, Fourth Doctor Tom Baker appeared in a TV campaign called Keep Australia Beautiful.
   
4. Doctor Who had its first and only Australian companion in the 1980s: Tegan Jovanka. The character was a flight attendant for Air Australia. The actress who played her, Janet Fielding, was born in Brisbane.
   
5. BBC published a novel by Gary Russell called Doctor Who: Big Bang Generation that is set in Sydney 2015.
   

And for fans who want to know more, ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) produced a segment that describes other connections between Doctor Who and Australia.  

My daughter and I are waiting eagerly for the next series of Doctor Who to air. We’re hoping the Thirteenth Doctor will travel to Australia in one of her adventures.