Celebrating the centenary of Canberra

By Kevin Andrews - The Canberra Times; The Punch - Tuesday, 24 May 2011

Today marks the centenary of the launch of the competition to design the national capital city of Australia. On May 24, 1911, the Minister for Home Affairs, King O’Malley, announced an international competition for the design. In 1899, the Colonial Premiers had decided that the permanent capital would be in New South Wales, not less than 100 miles from Sydney, and a Congress was held in Melbourne four months after Federation in 1901 on the planning of a capital.

Dalgety was first chosen as the site of the future capital in 1904, but four years later the Canberra Yass region was selected as a replacement. The site for the Australian Capital Territory was transferred to the Commonwealth of Australia in January 1911.

Half a world away in Chicago, two architects, whose names subsequently would come to be associated with Australia for ever, had married. Walter Burley Griffin qualified as an architect in 1901, subsequently working with Frank Lloyd Wright and conducting the practice when Wright went to Japan, before starting his own practice. Marion Lucy Mahony, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had also been employed in Wright’s office. They were major proponents of the “prairie” school of architecture: “I am what may be termed a naturalist in architecture.. .. I believe in architecture that is the logical outgrowth of the environment in which the building in mind is to be located. “

It was while the Griffins were on their honeymoon that they learnt of the competition. According to a report in the New York Times (June 2, 1912), after the announcement that Griffin had won the competition, and the $8,750 prize:

“Mr Griffin spent two months in work upon his plans, and finally submitted thirteen drawings, five feet by thirty inches in diameter. These included a lay-out of the central district of the city, a general plan of the city and its environs, long sections through the city in two-directions, and a prospective bird’s eye view of the city from Mount Ainslie.”

Marion Mahony’s impressive drawings and renderings of the plan no doubt helped the judges to select the Americans from the 137 entries in the competition, despite neither having ever visited Australia. Speaking after the announcement in 1912, Griffin said:

“I have planned a city not like any other city in the world. I have planned it not in a way that I expected any governmental authorities in the world would accept. I have planned an ideal city – a city that meets my ideal of the city of the future”

With unknowing prescience Griffin added: “I do not know to what extent my plan will be carried out. The Australian authorities may merely adopt my ground plan and fill in the architectural details to suit themselves. However, if my plan is carried out in all its details, I think the Australian capital will be the most beautiful city in history.”

“I do not know whether I shall be called to Australia to superintend the construction of the new city,” he added. “I hope so.”

History records that the Griffins did come to Canberra to supervise the plan, but they had a rocky relationship with bureaucrats, eventually resulting in Walter being removed as director of construction by the Hughes government in 1921. He subsequently left Australian for India in 1935, having designed the towns of Leeton and Griffiths, and residential developments at Castlecrag in Sydney and at Eaglemont in Melbourne; as well as a series of notable buildings including Melbourne’s Capital Theatre and Newman College at the University of Melbourne.

The main features of Griffin’s plans for the national capital can be observed in Canberra today, especially the triangle, the lake formed from damming the Molongo River, and the location of the Parliament, Civic, the University and the Military. But, as Professor David Dolan observes, the Griffin “vision is grossly diluted and adulterated” and was “ruthlessly compromised.” Indeed the only fully completed structure that Griffin designed is the grave of the WW1 general, Sir William Bridges, at the Royal Military College, Duntroon!

Debates about the Griffin legacy are for other occasions, as are discussions about the future development and place of Canberra in the national polity.

It is appropriate that the Australian Parliament recognizes and celebrates the centenary of the city that was designed as its home, and which in the decades since has become a thriving, modern symbol of Australia, a location for government, culture and commerce, and the home for hundreds of thousands of our citizens.