Three ways to experience connection in Canberra

If you could put your fingertips to Australia's own and experience pure entanglement, would you?

In Canberra, the invitation is there — the offer to lean in and put your forehead to Canberra's own. To connect with its ancient landscape, to converse with its passionate people, to reflect on a history chequered and unreconciled, and meet with those still telling its stories, and righting its path.

Canberra District Wine Region

Since 1971, when CSIRO scientists planted the first modern vines outside Canberra, the District has been forging its wine-region-underdog identity — and it shows, in the best possible way. Latticed with vines over 400 hectares, dotted with around 40 cellar doors, the region spills into New South Wales but couldn't care less about borders.

For the Riesling faithful, you're in the right place: Ken Helm's claims to grape-themed fame are many — he was one of those pioneering CSIRO scientists, founder of the Canberra International Riesling Challenge, and his cellar door, a humble 1888 schoolhouse where Methodist temperance ladies once met to sign the pledge against alcohol, not only pours one of the country's best Rieslings but neighbours one of its most lauded drops: Clonakilla's Shiraz Viognier.

The best way into the region is with someone tapped well and truly into the grape vine. Van Du Vin's private, fully customised tours take you beyond the well-worn cellar door circuit and into the boutique and the boutique-er — smaller producers, unhurried tastings, and tête-à-têtes with the oenophiles responsible for the grapes in your glass. Every tour is different, with itineraries tailored to palates. The only WSET Level 3 guide in the region leads each one — your direct line to Drops of God-esque knowledge. A few tastings in, ruddy cheeked and merry, reflect not only on this spectacular patch of fertile earth, but on the stem in your hand and its connection to an elemental curiosity 8,000 years old.

Megalo Print Studio and Canberra Glassworks

The plan for this city was always grand and ambitious, but its vision relied heavily on craft, artistic vision and the bare-bones necessity of getting your hands dirty. Gardens planted and manicured, sculptures carved with heart, misunderstood Brutalist monoliths whose proportions betray the warmth and humanity of their architects' logic. Every detail requiring an artist of sorts. And in this city of makers, two stops are essential:

At Megalo Print Studio — Australia's largest open-access print studio, founded in 1980, housed in the former Kingston Transport Depot — ink is the medium and patience is the method. Screenprint, lithography, relief, intaglio: the full range of print disciplines under one roof, which makes Megalo one of very few studios of its kind in the world. Book a workshop, take a place at the bench beside an artist in residence, and leave with something you made yourself — pulled through a screen, pressed into paper, your own hand-forged artwork. There is something in the act of making — something creaturely and settling — that reminds you, with an almost primal pull to pencil, paint or paper, what your hands are actually for.

A short walk away, the Canberra Glassworks occupies the heritage-listed Kingston Powerhouse — a building whose industrial bones are glad to be so – because in here, it's hot and raw. Artists working with molten flame in a process that feels near-primeval. Take a seat on the Hotshop viewing deck and — partially or wholly hypnotised — watch them at work below. Glasswork is a chemical process ancient and artisan, something closer to symphony than science — glassblower, furnace, pipe, block, marver, glory hole, and whatever else is required for a fiery orb to take shape and become art. The molten glob hanging from a pontil rod, so light it seems fortified air. Glinda's bubble, spinning slowly. To try your own lungs at this spellbinding craft, check the website for workshops and demonstrations. You will feel, in the making, briefly and unexpectedly, like the most present version of yourself — and whatever you thought you knew about glass will be shattered.

Lanyon Homestead

Australia was settled with the sweat of more than 162,000 convicts. For almost 100 years, the empire's steady machinery of forced deportation disgorged them into stolen land. Occupied by Indigenous Australians for millennia, it was anything but empty. Lanyon Homestead holds all of this — in its fieldstone walls, its convict-built outbuildings, its gardens running down to the Murrumbidgee — and invites you to connect and reckon with it.

Thirty minutes south of the city, at the foot of the Brindabella Ranges, the 1859 homestead sits in a landscape the Ngunnawal people managed and sustained for tens of thousands of years before Andrew Cunningham — a Scottish banker turned sheep farmer — built his fieldstone walls and ran 25,000 sheep across the plains. In 1975, Sidney Nolan stood on this ground to launch his gift to the nation — 24 paintings, including early Ned Kelly works, which he had chosen to house here specifically, in the rural landscape that had fired his imagination. The same red dirt and wide sky that became Kelly's world on his canvas. When the collection was later moved to a gallery in Civic, his widow was furious. Lanyon keeps the memory of why he chose this place.

Your guide knows every inch of the homestead, every stone, every room — the stories of those who arrived in chains, and those who came by choice and made it their world regardless. In winter, dine under the stars — Canberra's dry air and dark skies offer a crystal view of the cosmos, the Brindabellas on the horizon, the Murrumbidgee meandering somewhere below, and above, the same sky that has seen it all.

If you learned Australian history in school, there will be gaps. Lanyon Homestead is a place that meets you where you are, and helps fill them.

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