Should I Have Done Things Differently, Dear Readers?
By Ian Warden
January 31 2026 - 5:00am
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference."
These immortal lines from Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken resonate deeply with shy, timid, and self-effacing newspaper columnists like myself. We often stand in awe of the bold, swaggering, and thundering heroes of our profession, wondering about the paths we might have chosen instead.
The Thunderous Proclamations of Others
Consider Simon Tisdall of The Guardian, who recently directed a fiery proclamation at all 342 million Americans. In a piece entitled The global rule of law is not collapsing, Tisdall argues that since America has spawned Donald Trump and inflicted him on the world, it is now Americans' duty to right this global wrong.
His words are nothing short of thunderous: "Citizens of the Republic! Impeach Trump. Declare him unfit. Rise up, rebel and overthrow him as, 250 years ago, George III was overthrown. Do whatever you must to peacefully rid the world of this gaudy, gormless usurper and dethrone this would-be king - but do it fast. Spike his guns. Shut him down. Lock him up. Exorcise the monster. The US in 2026 requires a second revolution. To escape the nightmare, to rescue democracy, to rebuild the city on the hill, the tyrant must fall."
Whether Americans will heed Tisdall's demands remains to be seen, but one cannot help but gasp at the self-confident might and swagger of such a proclamation. As I reflect in the twilight of my long opinion-writing career, I wonder if I should have embraced more society-shirtfronting, more thundering and sermonising, rather than shyly trying to trick my readership into learning with a laugh or tenderising hard hearts with kindly ideas.
Ah, the Roads Not Taken
This reflection leads me to ponder other roads not taken, particularly in Australian history. Several readers have been intrigued by last week's column, which referenced what I called the national error of building the federal capital city where it is instead of at the vastly superior site at Dalgety.
As I have written elsewhere, there was a "battle of the sites" before the federal capital site was chosen. This battle culminated in an exciting, exhaustive ballot in federal parliament, where the vaunted Canberra region site came from behind to just pip the fancied but not-quite-so-vaunted Dalgety site at the post.
During my visits to little, unchanged, unchanging Dalgety while researching for Canberra's 2013 centenary year, it was poignant to stand high on a hill and contemplate the bleakly lovely, empty alpine plains of the Monaro. I imagined the city that might have arisen there—another of Frost's roads not taken.
Imagining Alternative Histories
Ah, the roads not taken. What if, for the nation's sake, John Howard had taken the road of his father's honourable profession as a garage proprietor instead of the sordid road of Liberal Party politics? And what if the judges of the international competition for the design of the federal capital city had chosen not the entry of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin of Chicago, entry number 29, but one of the 136 other entries?
John Reps' mighty illustrated history of the competition, Canberra 1912, marvels at the diversity of submissions: "They [the entries] came from Finland, France and Fawkner, from Boston, Brisbane and Bendigo. From Canada and Cape Town, Mexico and Melbourne, Italy and India, Paraguay ... They were based on squares, circles and hexagons. They were modelled on medieval market towns and the shape of the Southern Cross. They copied Washington, Paris and a Russian town in Manchuria."
It is with a sigh, very like the wistful, regretful sigh in Frost's poem, that one imagines the Canberra we might have had if the judges had gone down the road of Eliel Saarinen's entry number 18. The brilliant Finn's illustrations are wondrous, imagining the Molonglo River engineered to flow in exciting directions and crossed by ten individualistic bridges.
Saarinen's Vision: A Road Not Taken
One Sydney newspaper's critique of Saarinen's designs found that the street system defied "the demands of rapid traffic-movement." It described the layout as "a network of French curves and semi-ellipses, the very antithesis of the direct route, a bewilderment to the citizen, a maze to the stranger."
But to the modern urban Canberran mind, these criticisms don't seem criticisms at all. Quite apart from how beautiful the French curves and semi-ellipses would have been—contrasting with the drearily straight and plain city we have instead—today's worldwide city-planning trend is to resist the tyranny of the motor car and rapid-traffic movement, instead empowering pedestrians and cyclists.
Saarinen's traffic-baffling design seems to anticipate this tyranny and aim to resist it. Moreover, his imagined city of "bewildering" but cognitively-challenging curves and semi-ellipses sounds like the very sorts of challenges experts prescribe today, such as crossword and sudoku puzzles, to help ward off cognitive decline.
Ah, your columnist sighs, the Saarinen city design road not taken in 1912! Not taking it has made all the difference. As I reflect on my own career and the alternate paths in history, I am left with a profound sense of what might have been, inspired always by Frost's timeless meditation on choices and their consequences.
