From Canberra — Australia’s National Capital by Crispin Hull
INTRODUCTION
Canberra was conceived in jealousy, born in indifference, but now has matured to be one of the finest places of habitation created in human history.
It is a planned city. It was created with deliberation, with the highest of ideals. Yet is has been called a city without a soul. A collection of suburbs in search of a city. A place whose best view comes from the back of a leaving train. A waste of a good sheep station.
How did this city come about? Before 1901, the continent of Australia consisted of six British colonies. Each had a degree of self-rule, but they could all be over-ruled by the Government in London. In the 1880s and 1890s a popular and political move began for the six colonies to federate to form a single nation. The rivalry between the two main colonies, New South Wales and Victoria, ensured that neither’s capital would become the nation’s new capital. Instead, the Constitution of the new nation said a new capital was to be built in a federal territory taken out of NSW and until a new building in the new capital was built, Parliament would sit in Victoria’s capital, Melbourne.
Between 1902 and 1908 a search for the site took place. A place called Yass-Canberra — about 300 kilometres south west of Sydney — was selected and 2368 square kilometres of federal territory was delineated including Jervis Bay, an enclave on the NSW coast. Within that territory, the Surveyor-General of NSW, Charles Scrivener, borrowed by federal authorities for the task, chose the present site of the city and carried out a detailed survey.
In 1911 an international competition for the design of the new capital was run based on that survey. It was won by Chicago architect Walter Burley Griffin. In 1913 Canberra was formally named at the laying of the foundation stone. Griffin came to Canberra to help put his plan into reality. Then came a world war, a depression and another war, and not much progress was made in Canberra, except for the construction of the first Parliament House and the Australian War Memorial. Parliament opened in Canberra in 1927 – a lonely building in a vast plain containing just a few thousand people. The transfer of government from Melbourne was resisted and slow, until Prime Minister Robert Menzies took an active interest. In 1957 he set up the National Capital Development Commission to accelerate the planning and development of the city. Government departments were moved from Melbourne and the city mushroomed. As the city grew, the hilltops were left with natural vegetation. Combined with massive tree and shrubs plantings, the result was the creation the Bush Capital — a garden city in a clean environment.
The centrepiece of Griffin’s plan, the lake, was begun in 1960 with the construction of the two bridges on the avenues that formed two sides of the Parliamentary Triangle. The damming of the Molonglo River was completed in 1963 and several months later, the lake had filled. Menzies officially named it Lake Burley Griffin in 1964. Griffin’s masterpiece — with some amendments — was now reality.
In 1988, after another international design competition, the New and Permanent Parliament House was opened. The following year, the federal territory was given its own local Parliament and self-government. Now 300,000 people live in a mature city enjoying some of the best educational, cultural, recreational and employment opportunities in the world.