Ditto, Craigo!! I think Canberra is vastly underrated! It's a clean, pretty city, with lots of green spaces (hey, where else can you do some excellent birdwatching and spot a big family of Eastern gray kangaroos peacefully grazing a couple of kms from the CBD?), no traffic, great libraries, perfectly adequate stores, good restaurants, etc.

Nope, it doesn't have the stunning water views you get in Sydney, or the busy life, international metropolis feel of it, so you probably shouldn't put it on top of the list of cities to visit on your first trip to Oz. But it seems like a very very livable city. The only drawbacks are the occasional bad weather, and the maze-like city plan: it takes a few tries before you can get from point A to point B without going around in a big circle that returns you inevitably to point A.

Anyway, that's the *big* city for us Where we live now, there's 1 bank, 1 IGA, 1 chemist and a few cafes/restaurants (luckily, we like fish 'n' chips). No movie theaters, but the coastline is a dream...