For most of the 1940s, the best table in Canberra was a boarding house dining room in Barton, and the man at it was the prime minister.
Ben Chifley lived at the Hotel Kurrajong, which had opened in 1926 as Hostel No. 2, a place to park politicians who had nowhere else to sleep in a capital still drawing its own street plan. Chifley never left. He ate there, took his caucus over breakfast there, and in June 1951 died in room 205 while a Commonwealth Jubilee ball carried on up the hill at Parliament House. The dining room was not a restaurant in any sense we would use now. It was a canteen with the nation's business on the menu. You ate what the kitchen made, at the hour the kitchen made it, and the conversation was the reason for being there.
