Canberra was born on March 12th, 1913.
Until the 1890s Australia consisted of six separate colonies. They had their own parliaments and their own administrations, with different policies and different tax rates. They ran their own separate armed forces. They issued different postage stamps, built their railway lines on different gauges and set their clocks to different times. At the borders between them officials collected import duties and a family that moved from one state to another risked having to pay duty on some of its belongings. Not surprisingly a strong federalist movement had developed, fostered by a growing sense of national identity, and after 1898 a federal constitution was worked out by delegates from most of the colonies. It was profoundly democratic and it has stood the test of time.