When is a grand and purposeful park not really a park at all, but an isolated roundabout surrounded by a busy thoroughfare?
When it's City Hill.
You know it, even though you don't quite realise what it is as you drive around it, counting the rabbits while idling at the lights in peak hour.
It's the rather innocuous grassy incline with the flagpole in the middle, right at the top of Northbourne Avenue, known mainly for being hard to get to, and, yes, infested with rabbits all year round.
It's also, you may be surprised to know, one of the points in what is now known as the National Triangle, one of the key features of the Griffin plan.
The original design was supposed to emphasise the six main avenues that radiate out from the hill, but it's hard to imagine a less awe-inspiring place, especially as it's also at the gateway to Canberra's city centre.
The green slopes are as much rabbit poo as grass, and the avenue leading up to it is a halfhearted median strip lined with planter boxes, messy gravel and rabbit burrows.
The whole thing feels more like an underused suburban park, albeit one dotted with mature trees.
And it's an outlier when compared with many of Canberra's most celebrated and cultivated design features - the lake, Commonwealth Park, the National Rose Gardens at Old Parliament House.
Charles Weston, Canberra's first head of Parks & Gardens, planted up City Hill in 1921, and, as was the case in the capital's earliest days, much care was taken when planning it out.
There are double staggered rows of Roman cypresses, with 12 oval-shaped groups radiating out, and six groups of Monterey pines to highlight the symmetrical design.
They are striking when viewed from above.
But standing in the hill's dappled sunshine 102 years later, you can't help wondering what Weston would make of the scene today.
When he first arrived in Canberra in 1911, it was very clear he had quite a job on his hands.
Windswept, over-grazed, devoid of trees and, yes, rabbit-infested, the site for the new national capital was bleak, to put it mildly.
The ground was so inhospitable that Weston had to resort, in the early days, to blasting the ground open with gelignite to start the first plantings. From 1913 to 1926, he was responsible for planting 2 million trees and shrubs. It was the start of the leafy capital we know and love today.
The trees are the reason City Hill is now heritage-listed, and protected from development.
But what about the rabbits? Visible from almost any angle, they frolic and play and rule the roost, coming a cropper under wheels, and scattering prettily when the odd pedestrian ventures onto the hill.
But they were the very bane of life for many of Canberra's earliest developers, and make a minor mockery of the news, last month, that the ACT government is looking for ideas to transform the space into something both popular and accessible.
But we shouldn't mock; there are, at least, plans afoot to do something with it, after so many years of nothing. And, true to our centenary-old heritage, the plan is being put to the people.
Chief Minister Andrew Barr himself is commissioning a design competition for the space - heritage-listed, if you please - which he hopes will one day be "a reimagining of the space as a city park rather than the centre of a roundabout, a rabbit warren, and the place where there's a flagpole".
Too right. And why not dream big? The City Renewal Authority, tasked with running the competition, already has stars in its proverbial eyes. Its head, Malcolm Snow, has enthused that such a competition may attract national, even international interest.
International! It's hard not to get excited at the prospect. International design competitions are in our very DNA, after all; the original plans for this city arrived, nearly late, by ship all the way from Chicago.
But as you stand, as we did this week, on the rabbit poo and gaze around, it's hard to imagine just what would work there. And the rabbits are kind of mesmerising, as they frolic and graze. It's like watching goldfish swim lazily in a bowl.
No wonder it's taken so long to finally pay attention to this "integral component" of the Griffins' plan.
EDITORIAL: City Hill's rabbit problem has a solution
But just think of Charles Weston, and his gelignite.
I don't think he'd be turning in his grave, particularly, because he was too practical, and too alive to the fact that Canberra would always be something of an uphill battle.
But I do think he'd agree, as all of Canberra's earliest founders did at some time or other, that it's time to get the job done.
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