Canberra's story runs deeper than its 1913 founding: thousands of years of Ngunnawal country, 1830s sheep-run homesteads, and a capital drawn onto the ridges between them. Three days tracing those layers, from plant-use trails to Anzac Parade.
The national museum on Acton Peninsula opens 09:00 daily and entry to the permanent galleries is free. The First Australians gallery holds bark paintings, the Yalangbara story and objects tracing tens of thousands of years of occupation.
The national institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research sits next door on Acton Peninsula, holding over a million items. Its free ground-floor exhibition rotates collection material, including early field recordings and language maps.
A signposted trail inside the Botanic Gardens on Black Mountain showing how Ngunnawal people used local plants for food, fibre and medicine — kurrajong bark cordage, native raspberry, cherry ballart. Gardens open 08:30-17:00.
Seventeen stone, steel and glass 'slivers' run between the National Library and the High Court, each carrying photographs and text on Stolen Generations testimony, Aboriginal servicemen and the 1967 referendum. Open ground, always accessible.
The ceremonial avenue between the lake and Mount Ainslie is lined with national memorials — the Vietnam Forces stele, the Korean War obelisk field, the Rats of Tobruk pylon and Kemal Atatürk's 1934 words carved into granite.
The 50m bell tower was Britain's gift marking Canberra's 50th anniversary, opened in 1970 with bells cast in England. Recitals run most days around lunchtime and the sound carries across the whole central basin from the island.
The archive occupies the 1931 Institute of Anatomy building, an art deco pile with Australian fauna worked into the plasterwork and a zodiac-tiled foyer. Free galleries hold some of the earliest surviving Australian footage.
The 843m summit above Campbell frames Walter Burley Griffin's land axis in a single line — Memorial, Anzac Parade, lake, the old parliament and Capital Hill — making the 1912 plan legible in a way no map manages.
An 1859 homestead on the Murrumbidgee built with convict labour on a run established in the 1830s. Slab outbuildings, the convict-era kitchen and the Cunningham family rooms survive on the original river flats south of the city.
Tharwa Bridge, opened 1895, is the oldest surviving Allan truss bridge in Australia and the district's first proper river crossing. Cuppacumbalong homestead sits at the Gudgenby junction beside it, with a marked grave of Ngunnawal leader Onyong nearby.
A 1927 bungalow left almost untouched by the Calthorpe family for 60 years — original wallpaper, wireless, kitchen fittings and garden intact. It shows exactly how the first federal public servants lived in the raw new capital.
Consecrated in 1845 for the Campbell family of Duntroon, this is the oldest surviving building in central Canberra. Its churchyard holds the graves of the district's first settlers and shepherds, decades before the capital existed.