An Emerald City?
Water and the Colonial Picturesque at the National Capital,
1901-1964
Christopher Vernon
Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and the Visual Arts, University of Western Australia
cvernon@cyllene.uwa.edu.au
Introduction
The transformation of an obscure, arid plateau into Australia’s national capital
began in 1913. Now, less than a century later, Canberra has grown to a population
of over 300,000 people and become Australia’s largest inland metropolis.
Encountering the city today, however, is an ethereal experience. Traditionally, the
civic grandeur associated with national capitals is derived from concentrations of
architectural magnificence. Canberra’s grandeur or monumentality, however,
emanates from the omnipresence of the city’s landscape ─especially its luminous
Lake Burley Griffin centrepiece. The capital’s distinctive landscape pre-eminence is
not accidental. In fact, mediated by a nationalistic fascination with landscape ─both
native and recollected─ design visions for Australia’s capital were securely in place
before the city had a site, a plan or even a name. Although often competing, these
early visions for the national capital shared ‘memories of green’ and an inter-related
preoccupation with water.
A New National Capital
On 1st January 1901, six of Great Britain’s antipodean colonies federated to form
the Commonwealth of Australia. Ambition to build a national capital quickly
followed. Convened that May in Melbourne, the temporary capital, a ‘Congress of
Engineers, Architects, Surveyors and Others Interested in the Building of the
Federal Capital of Australia’ galvanised interest in the enterprise.1 In harsh contrast
to the ‘emerald green’ and comparatively lush landscape of its colonial origins, the
Australian nation occupies a brown, arid continent. Unsurprisingly, the role water
would play at the new capital pervaded the Congress’ wide-ranging deliberations.
Delegates resolved, for instance, that water and its supply should be considered not
only for ‘sanitary services’ but also ‘the creation of artificial lakes, maintenance of
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public gardens, [and] fountains.’ Discussion, however, was not confined to water’s
utility; the resolution also had aesthetic implication. Use of the term ‘lakes’ ─in lieu
of ‘reflecting pools’ or ‘basins’─ suggests not only water bodies of considerable
scale, but also ones irregular in outline and ‘nature-like’ in appearance.
A congress delegate, Mr A Evans, made this aesthetic dimension explicit in
his paper ‘A Waterside Federal Capital’. For him, water was ‘the most important
factor in affording a grand perspective to a noble city’, adding that ‘the close
proximity of a large sheet of water to palatial buildings enhances their appearance
immeasurably’.2 Illustrating his point, Evans cited the 1893 World’s Columbian
Exposition as an object-lesson. At the Chicago fair, he asserted, ‘magnificent’
architectural effects were ‘produced by the presence of fine sheets of water’.
‘Imagine’, Evans speculated, ‘the same design spread over a waterless landscape’?
‘A Waterside Federal Capital’ also underscores water’s prominence within
debates as to the future city’s site. Although thinly veiled by its title, Evans’ essay
was actually a propaganda piece; it advocated less the generic concept of a
waterside capital and more the banks of Lake George in New South Wales (NSW)
as its ideal location. Indeed, the Congress proceedings featured Sydney architect
Robert C G Coulter’s graphic representation of Evans’ urban vision for the naturallyoccurring lake as its frontispiece.3 Evans rhapsodised:
The view is taken from the Governor-General’s residence, shewing his watergate entrance in the left foreground. On the sloping hillsides and down to the
water’s edge are the palatial buildings of State and learning, whilst dotted
amongst the foliage appear the villas of the residents and the spires of
churches and public buildings. Along the shores would be handsome
promenades and jetties. In the water appear picturesque boating sheds,
whilst the white wings of yachts on the Lake fill in the picture, alike beautiful
in the full blaze of day, or in the purple twilight’.4
Coulter’s rendering was both an artwork in itself as well as a purposeful
representation of a spatial design proposition. Considering this dualism, Evans’
descriptive use of the term ‘picture’ is telling. Here, ‘picture’ refers not so much to
the drawing as it does to the configuration and visual effect of the city it depicted.
Along with ‘picture’, phrases such as ‘dotted amongst the foliage’ suggest that
Evans scenographically conceptualised and, in turn, advocated the capital itself be
like a ‘picture’ or ‘picturesque’. Originating in Renaissance England, picturesque
landscapes take the natural world as their model and rely upon irregular expanses
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of water and sylvan luxuriance for their effect. At best, these considerable
environmental requisites render the Australian application of picturesque technique
problematic. Given this, Evans’ view also attests to the potency of nostalgia, if not
imperialism. Indeed, even Coulter’s image was literally and metaphorically
Eurocentric. Although the city’s architecture and symbolic content might be
‘Australian’ and its trees of local species, the twentieth-century nation’s landscape
taste ─at least for Evans─ remained colonial, rooted in eighteenth-century Britain.5
In Australia, the picturesque was introduced with the First Fleet’s arrival in
1788. ‘Almost Phillip’s first act on land in a Sydney Cove’, Paul Carter assessed,
‘was to mark a line on the ground’. ‘The line’, he explains, ‘had a double function: it
created an enclosure, and it also defined what lay outside it as no longer a
continuum of gloomy woods but as a newly picturesque backdrop, a theatrical
setting for the first act of the great colonial drama’.6 The picturesque, however, was
not simply a benign matter of optics. Along with bringing the unfamiliar, newlyencountered Australian landscape into scenographic focus, colonists physically
remoulded the terrain into picturesque conformity. ‘New landowners’, Carter
enlarges, ‘employed gardeners to create landscapes that looked antique,
wilderness-like, picturesque’. These landscapes of artifice featured ‘clumps of trees,
intersecting slopes, [and] glimpsed sheets of water [which] were fitted together like
a jigsaw until it was hard to imagine it looking any other way’.7 This metamorphosis,
Carter argues, was motivated by the colonists’ desire to ‘disguise the artificiality of
their usurpation’.8 Similarly, a picturesque Australian capital would obscure the
nation’s youth and, through aesthetic and stylistic continuity, visually evoke its
political status as a member of the larger Empire. If the Sydney Cove settlement
was the colonial drama’s first act, then the construction of a new national capital
would be its last.
Evans’ Lake George campaign furthered the protracted ‘battle of the sites’
begun earlier in the debates surrounding Federation itself.9 Having adopted
American precedent, Australia’s constitution required the national capital to be
positioned within a larger federal territory. Seven contested years later in 1908, the
‘Yass-Canberra’ district of New South Wales was selected.10 With the federal
territory finally identified, surveyor Charles Scrivener was now entrusted to
determine the city’s specific site. Scrivener’s official instructions confirm that the
national capital enterprise was as much a landscape design proposition as it was
an engineering concern. As such, the site’s selection criteria codified and
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embedded a picturesque approach from the outset. Potential locations were to be
evaluated, for instance, from a ‘scenic standpoint, with a view to securing
picturesqueness, and with the object of beautification’.11 The city itself was to be
‘beautiful’ and occupy ‘a commanding position with extensive views’ and ‘distinctive
features’. In 1909, the surveyor selected the ‘Limestone Plains’ ─an open, largely
pastoral site in the broad valley of the Molonglo River─ as fulfilling these
considerable criteria. The new capital’s site now fixed, the Commonwealth launched
an international competition to secure the city’s design in 1911. However, its choice
of a dry inland site ─a variant of the ‘waterless landscape’ that Evans urged be
avoided─ made the need for artificial water bodies acute. Consequently, amongst
its myriad of requirements, the competition brief encouraged participants to
consider damming the Molonglo to create ‘ornamental waters’.12
The Griffins’ Canberra
In May 1912, American landscape architect Walter Burley Griffin’s (1876-1937)
design was selected as the competition’s winner.13 Although submitted in Walter’s
name, the plan was actually conceived collaboratively with his wife and professional
partner, Marion Mahony Griffin (1871-1961). Unlike others’, the Griffins’ submission
was distinguished by its sensitive response to the site’s physical features,
especially its rugged landforms and watercourse. This attribute proved paramount
to their design’s success. Organised on a cross-axial scheme, the Griffins’ plan
fused geometric reason with picturesque naturalism.14 When negotiating the fit of
their geometric template with the actual site, the couple opted to venerate existing
landforms. Hills, for instance, were not design impediments to be erased, but
‘opportunities to be made the most of’. Discerning a linear correspondence between
the summits of four local mounts, the couple inscribed and accentuated the
alignment with a ‘Land Axis’.15 Anchored by Mt Ainslie at one end, the Land Axis
extends some twenty-five kilometres to its other terminus, Mt Bimberi. By using its
topographical features as axial determinants and visual foci, the Griffins ‘sacralised’
the future city’s physical site.
For the Griffins, the Molonglo valley posed no less a design opportunity than
did the site’s landforms. Accordingly, the couple delineated a ‘Water Axis’ across its
‘Land’ counterpart at a right angle, aligning it with the river course. Answering the
competition brief’s call to establish ‘ornamental waters’, the Griffins reconfigured the
river to form a continuous chain of basins and lakes which stylistically reconciled
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‘formal’ with ‘natural’. As one moves out from its centre, the water body’s outline
and spatial character metamorphoses; the central basins’ geometry gives way to
the irregular margins of the terminal ‘East’ and ‘West’ lakes. Here, the banks take
on the character of a naturally-occurring wetland, a visual and spatial quality
perhaps more compatible with Australian anticipation of the picturesque.
Scenographically, when considering the city from its inner summits, these
‘ornamental waters’ punctuate the middle-ground view. The Griffins’ waterway,
however, served more than static ‘ornamental’ purposes; it was also a functioning,
hydraulic system.
The Griffins’ Aqueous Design Sources
A multiplicity of American sources informed the aqueous dimension of the Griffins’
design for the Australian capital. Amongst these, the work of pioneering landscape
architect Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) looms large. In 1893, the Griffins’
native Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition, providing Walter and
Marion with opportunity to experience Olmsted’s artistry at first-hand. In fact, Walter
─then still in high school─ made excursions to the fair during its construction and
after its official opening. Its layout largely Olmsted’s creation, the exposition
realised, if only ephemerally, an ideal city in miniature on the shores of Lake
Michigan. Juxtaposed against the chaos of nearby Chicago, the exposition’s ‘Court
of Honor’ centrepiece was a unified cross-axial composition of ‘white’, classicallyinspired buildings. Demarcated by reflecting basins, the axes gained spatial
dimension from the fair’s historicist architecture. Through their linear alignment and
vertical mass, buildings enclosed and contained lateral views and established
spatial corridors. One axis took the exposition’s Administration building as its
western terminus; the multi-storied structure also serving as a viewing platform.
From here, the eye looked east and travelled down the aqueous corridor’s
trajectory, past a monolithic statue of the ‘Republic’, through the backdrop
‘Peristyle’ and across the lake to rest at the distant horizon; the nexus between the
water’s shimmering surface and the blue dome of the prairie sky. This was one of
the ‘magnificent’ effects Evans later praised at Australia’s 1901 federal capital
congress. North of the ‘Court of Honor’, one encountered Olmsted’s ‘Wooded Isle’
and its irregular lagoon surrounds ─a serene, green oasis set amidst the intense
animation of the ‘White City’. This ensemble foiled the regular geometry and
classical ambience which otherwise typified the exposition. Here, the planting was
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alluringly tropical in its effect, synthesising local wetland prototypes with the exotic
luxury of Panamanian rainforests. On the island itself, a Japanese temple and
garden heightened the precinct’s ethereal atmosphere. Overall, at the World’s
Columbian Exposition, architecture and landscape were continuous and intimately
linked. Griffin later adapted Olmsted’s compositional strategies and planting
typologies in his own work, most prominently at the Australian capital. The Griffins’
use of water as Canberra’s urban nucleus and an axial focus, for instance, took the
Court of Honor as its precedent; the ‘Wooded Isle’ similarly provided an object
lesson for the city’s lakes.
Olmsted’s 1887 design of a park system for metropolitan Boston was also of
great import to the Griffins. Here, Olmsted linked the city to the coast with a
parkland armature known as the ‘Emerald Necklace’.16 When delimiting the
integrated network’s extent, Olmsted innovatively sought to replace political with
natural boundaries. Along with local river catchments, the parkland’s limits
─otherwise seemingly amorphous─ actually expanded and contracted as
necessary to conserve examples of regionally-distinctive landscape types. These
sites included not only botanical, geological and other natural features, but also
cultural landscape vignettes such as rural scenery threatened by the burgeoning
city. At the finer scale, Olmsted’s 1879 ‘Back Bay Fens’ park design, the necklace’s
most important ‘jewel’, challenged convention. Eschewing more familiar, cultivated
imagery, the landscape architect took the locale’s indigenous salt marshes as his
alternative aesthetic source. Along with his radical aesthetic, Olmsted envisaged
the Fens as a hydraulic system, functionally analogous to its naturally-occurring
counterparts. Tidal fluctuations, for instance, were accommodated by means of
flood gates. Functionality similarly underpinned the Griffins’ design vision for
Canberra’s waters.
Canberra was the Griffins’ crucible for design ideas derived not only from
precedents set by others ─such as Olmsted’s visionary projects─ but also their own
work. When conceiving their Australian capital design, the couple enlarged
approaches and techniques tested earlier in Walter’s landscape architecture. Within
this context, his 1906 campus design for the Northern Illinois State Normal School
is one of Canberra’s direct precursors. His most extensive to date, the project
included not only considerable planting but also composing an array of new
buildings, a ‘sports field’ and ‘grandstand’, a playground and a thoroughfare
network.17 Unlike Chicago’s level, undistinguished tracts, the rural school’s
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expansive property ─some twenty-seven hectares in extent─ undulated and was
bisected by a tree-lined river meander and stream. Taking the river and stream as
emphatic cues, Griffin manipulated the watercourses to form an integrated network
of artificial cascades, pools and lagoons. Mirroring the school’s main building on
their surface, the chain of water bodies became the campus’ luminous focus.
The design prominence Griffin awarded the river and lagoons expressed his
special mystique for water and its distinctive position within the regional landscape.
Although comparatively abundant with respect to rainfall, water’s physical presence
in the landscape ─save for the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River─ is almost as
rare a phenomenon in America’s vast inland prairies as it is in Australia.
Consequently, features such as rivers were spatially precious. Unlike in ‘Atlantic
coast cities’, a contemporary professional journal explained to its largely Eastern
readership, only roads ‘that follow the course of the rivers or the shore of lakes’
dispelled the ‘chess-board monotony’ of the Middle West’s otherwise ubiquitous
grid.18 Water was a genuine relief of geometry as well as a reflector of sky.
Canberra’s centrepiece basins and lakes, designed five years after the Illinois
campus, confirm that Griffin’s mystique for the aqueous was abiding.
In its seamless fusion of crystalline geometry with picturesque naturalism,
Canberra displays another debt to Griffin’s Illinois campus. Along with its water
bodies, the campus featured a series of formal terrace gardens, enveloping the
school’s principal building. Here, the gardens’ plan geometry reconciled the
‘octagonal battlements’ of the building’s castellated architecture with the wider
landscape.19 As the composition’s set piece or fulcrum, the gardens provided an
elevated platform from which to view the lagoons in the middle distance and the
sylvan landscape beyond. Assessing Griffin’s synthesis of the ‘formal’ with the
‘natural’, the school’s gardener observed that ‘no abrupt or startling transition from
one to the other style is discernible’.20 For Griffin, however, ‘formal’ and ‘natural’
were not merely stylistic issues. More profoundly, Griffin’s resolution expressed his
conception of the natural world itself. For him, nature’s form vocabulary or
‘language’, as for instance expressed in botanical reproduction or crystal formation,
was an essentially geometric one.
A Competing Vision
Initially, the Griffins’ American-born design for the Australian capital appeared to be
compatible with local aesthetic sensibilities, especially notions of landscape beauty.
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Unlike Chicago’s increasingly urbanised hinterland, Australia remained the place
where, as novelist D H Lawrence asserted, ‘people mattered so little’.21 Partly owing
to the spatial insignificance of human occupation, the native landscape was preeminent. By the 1912 Canberra competition, fuelled by domestic sources such as
Heidelberg School landscape paintings, an idealised image of ‘the Bush’ had
already gained potency as a symbol of an inextricably ‘grounded’ national identity.
The competition judges possibly saw the Griffins’ design as a celebration of the
national landscape; owing to the significance it awarded their capital’s physical site.
The two American designers, however, were unaware of the local landscape’s
increasingly nationalistic connotations.22 Marion Griffin compellingly conveyed their
design’s landscape imagery in a series of exquisite renderings, in themselves works
of art.23
The decision to award the Griffins’ design first prize, however, was not
unanimous. In fact, a dissenting judge had given first place to a local design by
Sydney architects Griffiths, Coulter and Caswell. This consortium’s ‘Coulter’ was the
same architect who had prepared the ‘Waterside Capital’ rendering for the 1901
federal capital congress. Now, a decade later, his group’s submission similarly
featured a watercolour perspective ‘view of the lake at sunset’.24 Despite the dimly
lit view, the ground’s surface is nonetheless visibly awash in green and, unlike in
the Griffins’ scheme of geometric containment, the margins of this group’s
‘ornamental waters’ meander. This was, arguably, the imagery of a city more at
home in the Northern hemisphere; one evidently more compatible with local
anticipation. Ultimately, however, Minister for Home Affairs King O’Malley’s final
decision endorsed the Griffins’ victory.25
The Griffins Endorsed
Vital to their design’s success, Marion Mahony Griffin’s renderings
contrasted dramatically with Griffiths, Coulter and Caswell’s submission. Infused
with sepia, gold and other luminescent tonalities, her alluring graphic ensemble
evoked the site’s more authentic landscape coloration. Apparently under the
drawings’ spell, an English critic, for instance, rhapsodised that ‘the buildings are
spread so thinly on the ground, are so masked with trees, and are so small relative
to the majestic roll of the terrain, that you see, not them, but Australia’. 26 Despite its
laudatory intent, this assessment also reveals that the drawings were potentially
deceptive in their persuasiveness; the images were easily misread by lay people.
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Save for her ‘City and Environs’ plan view, the visual impact of the proposed city’s
geometry and Chicago-like density was diminished, if not camouflaged, by Marion’s
portrayals of the site’s vegetation and landforms. This phenomenon is exemplified
in her ‘View from summit of Mount Ainslie’; therein, an elevated foreground of
delicate, layered foliage veils the rigid street geometry of the city below. Some,
perhaps, appreciated the irregular, picturesque imagery of the Griffins’ city at the
expense of its regular, highly-structured reality.
Newly-appointed ‘Federal Capital Director of Design and Construction’,
Walter Burley Griffin, along with Marion, moved to Australia in 1914. Beginning
Canberra’s detailed design, he awarded priority to road layout and planting with
local species. Buildings were to be constructed afterwards, carefully inserted within
this structural template. Griffin’s Canberra tenure, however, proved short-lived.
Political antagonisms and the financial restraints posed by the World War conspired
against the complete realisation of the couple’s design.27 Walter’s official
association with Canberra ended controversially with the abolition of his position in
1920. Afterwards, his singular role was usurped by a succession of advisory bodies.
Nonetheless, a version of the Griffins’ design was officially gazetted ─enshrined in
Commonwealth law─ in 1925. The gazetted plan, however, reproduced only the
couple’s street layout, omitting the design’s land-use and other structural elements.
Post-War Canberra
By the 1950s, some three decades after Griffin’s departure, the national capital was
languishing. More a disparate assemblage of garden suburbs than a city, Canberra
still lacked a palpable urban fabric.28 The capital, however, found a champion in
Prime Minister Robert Menzies. With his support, a Senate Select Committee was
appointed to investigate the city’s development in 1954. The committee found,
somewhat predictably, that administrators saw Canberra not ‘as a national capital’,
but ‘as an expensive housing scheme for public servants’.29 The inquiry also had a
more unanticipated outcome. Sydney town planning academic Peter Harrison
reported that realisation of the Griffins’ design was not contingent upon the
‘construction of grand buildings’; arguing instead that buildings were ‘made
important’ by ‘their setting’. For Harrison and the Senate Committee, Canberra was
‘not an architectural composition but a landscape composition’.30 Although he
accurately identified landscape’s pre-eminent position within the Griffins’ scheme,
Harrison’s conception of it as simply architectural setting conveys the contemporary
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power of the Modernist viewpoint. Such a vision sees architecture in rational
opposition to the chaotic natural world. Architecture, in turn, is held as the only
means by which to order and structure that chaos. Landscape, instead of as a
formal entity in its own right, is regarded as merely setting or the space in-between
buildings. Nonetheless, Harrison’s close study of the original plan amounted to a
rediscovery and, at first, it appeared to resurrect the Griffins’ vision for the capital.
Bolstered by the Senate Committee’s bipartisan support, Prime Minister
Menzies acted decisively and sought expert advice to restart the city’s
development. Again, the Commonwealth looked overseas. This time, however, the
gaze ─influenced by Menzies─ was to London, not Chicago, and British town
planning authority William (later Lord) Holford (1907-75) was solicited for design
recommendations. Accepting the Commonwealth’s invitation, Holford travelled to
Canberra in June 1957 ─fresh from adjudicating Brazil’s design competition for its
new national capital.
Brazilian Parallels and Inspiration.
Contemporaneous with the Australian government’s enquiry into Canberra’s
development, elsewhere in the Southern hemisphere, its Brazilian counterpart
renewed a long-standing initiative to build a new national capital ─Brasilia─ in 1955.
Abandoning coastal Rio de Janeiro for an inland site, the Brazilian government
elected to stage a national design competition for Brasilia and retained William
Holford as one of its international adjudicators. As such, he was instrumental in
selecting the winning design.
Lúcio Costa (1902-98) won the Brasilia contest in March 1957. For him ─and
opposition to the Griffins’ approach─ Brasilia was ‘a deliberate act of conquest’ and
its site a wilderness tabula rasa. As his first design manoeuvre, Costa inscribed the
site, a plateau devoid of topographical incident, with a grand cross-axis. The
primary spine of the cross, the ‘Monumental Axis’, is an expansive turf mall lined
with governmental buildings. The cross armature ‘Motor Axis’, literally an
automobile thoroughfare, follows a broad arc; its curvature a pragmatic concession
to the plateau’s sloping edge. Whereas Canberra’s landforms dictated the Griffins’
axial alignments, Brasilia’s axes were the assertive products of Costa’s adherence
to Modernism’s functionalist, geometric ideals. Lacking the spatial and visual
containment afforded by rugged landforms, Costa’s axes risked vacuousness. In
remedy, he relied upon monumental architecture for axial accentuation.
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Brasilia’s most comprehensive landscape design project was the creation of
an expansive artificial lake, Lake Paranoá. Approximating the broad arc of the
‘Motor Axis’, the lake is sinuous and irregular in outline; a rare violation of the city’s
geometric order. In Costa’s plan, the juncture between the Monumental Axis and
the lake became a nodal location for the ‘Place of the Three Powers’, a
concentration of executive, judicial and other governmental buildings. Unlike
Canberra, Brasilia ultimately derived its identity not from landscape, but from
architecture. Nonetheless, Holford would extend Brasilia’s influence to the
antipodes through his design proposals for Canberra’s artificial lake.
The Triumph of the Picturesque.
In June 1957, only three month’s after Costa’s Brasilia victory, Holford
travelled to Canberra. After but a fortnight, Holford returned to London and
completed his Observations on the Future Development of Canberra, ACT that
December. The next year, Menzies established the National Capital Development
Commission (NCDC) to implement the report’s initiatives. Although charged with
effectively ‘re’- planning the entire city, Holford also developed two inter-related,
more detailed physical design proposals which nested within his overall plan for the
capital.
Like Peter Harrison and the Senate Select Committee, Holford also saw
Canberra more as a landscape design than an architectural proposition. Indeed, the
most dramatic built outcome of Holford’s consultancy would not be a new
government edifice, but the capital’s much-anticipated lake. With Lake Burley
Griffin’s completion in 1964, the city at last was unified in a manner compatible with
the couple’s vision. At the same time, however, the lake encapsulated prominent
departures from its namesake’s original design.
Unlike the freedom afforded Lúcio Costa when configuring Brasilia’s lake,
Holford ─and his successors to this day─ was constrained, if not haunted, by the
Griffin’s original design for Canberra’s water body. Despite the significance the
Harrison and the Senate Committee awarded the Griffins’ design approach,
Holford’s diverged considerably from the couples’ and he was no less determined to
evince his own hand in the city’s design. British Modernism, paradoxically, was
historicist in its landscape expression; drawing upon and re-vivifying the Eighteenth
century picturesque. Believing it necessary ‘to amend [its] formal symmetry’,
Holford dramatically revised the couple’s design in its belated execution. Holford
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now sought a ‘frankly picturesque treatment’ as, for him, it ostensibly ‘would be
more in keeping’ with the city’s ‘beautiful background of hill and valley’. 31
Consequently, instead of the precise, geometric clarity the Griffins originally
envisaged for the central basins, the new lake’s margins were alternatively
executed with an irregular edge and cloaked with picturesque parklands. Although
this result was, to a lesser degree, an economic concession to the steep
topography at the lake’s edge, the new lake’s configuration and its parklands was,
more prominently, the product of Modernism’s benign landscape imagery.
When re-conceptualising Canberra’s lake, Holford’s design concern
extended beyond the water body’s outline. In fact, he saw its banks as the ideal
locus for Australia’s still yet to be constructed permanent Parliament buildings. This
was a view informed not by the Griffins’ thinking but by his own Brazilian
experiences. Taking Brasilia’s ‘Place of the Three Powers’ as his precedent,
Holford now proposed to similarly position the government at the lake’s edge. Set
amidst the lake’s wider parkland surrounds, when viewed at a distance Australia’s
Parliamentary buildings would resemble follies in an English landscape garden.
Like the lake’s new configuration, Holford’s ‘Lakeside Parliament’ was also a
dramatic departure from the Griffins’ vision. Abandoning the Griffins’ elevated hilltop
site, Holford shifted the buildings further down the Land Axis to the lakeshore. At
long last, Canberra was now poised to realise a Modern variant of Coulter’s halfcentury old visions of a picturesque waterside capital. Implementation of the
scheme began in 1958. After a decade as the city plan’s status quo, however,
Holford’s ‘Lakeside Parliament’ was abandoned in 1968.
Although its Parliamentary nucleus was later deleted, the 1964 completion of
Lake Burley Griffin and its parkland margins began the transformation of Canberra’s
landscape into a Modernist ‘setting’. For Holford, Canberra was also to be, like
Brasilia, a ‘City of the Automobile’; the NCDC embarked upon an extensive
motorway building program. The capital’s modernist landscape would now be
increasingly experienced visually through an automobile windscreen frame.
Holford’s expansive new lake and ‘Lakeside Parliament’ ambition gave impetus to
the NCDC’s institutional view that ‘Griffin was history’.
Holford’s re-assertion of the picturesque at the Australian national capital
was not without political dimension. By the 1960s, some came to see the Griffins’
geometry as ‘American’; that is, ‘un-Australian’, if only by virtue of its authors’
nationality. With the realisation of Holford’s ideals, the picturesque re-colonised the
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Australian capital and re-cast Canberra’s die as British. The Griffins, for instance,
reserved the summit of the inner city’s highest hill for a ‘Capitol’, a ceremonial
building to commemorate the achievements of the Australian people.32 Holford,
however, thought the elevated site ideal for a residential ‘Royal Pavilion’; the British
monarch would gaze down upon not only the lakeside Parliament, but also ‘the
people’. When introducing this proposal, Holford reminded the government that ‘Her
Majesty the Queen is also Queen of Australia’.33 Menzies, of course, needed no
reminder. In fact, an imminent visit by Queen Elizabeth II initially galvanised
Menzies’ commitment to Canberra in 1953; the next year the Queen was to
dedicate the capital’s Australian-American Memorial. Acutely aware of the
episode’s symbolically political resonances, the Anglophile Prime Minister went so
far as to shift the memorial’s original Land Axis location to a less prominent
position. Holford’s Royal Pavilion, however, was never seriously pursued and, in
1988, Parliament House was constructed atop ‘Capitol Hill’.
If the Griffins sought to bring the Australian bush to the foreground, to give it
primacy, then throughout the Post War era it was relegated to the background in
lieu of deciduous trees, and memories of green. By the Twentieth century’s close,
Canberra landscape could be characterised as an expansive parkland derivative of
picturesque tradition. Indeed, American travel author Bill Bryson, writing in 2000,
observed that Canberra is ‘a very strange city, in that it’s not really a city at all, but
rather an extremely large park with a city hidden in it’.34 This is not to diminish
Holford and the NCDC’s achievement. An epiphany near his visit’s end led Bryson
to realise that, until then, he had ‘scorned’ Canberra ‘for what was in fact its most
admirable achievement’. ‘Without a twitch of evident stress’, he explained, the city’s
population had swelled ‘by a factor of ten since the late 1950s and yet was still a
park’.35
Today, ‘emerald green’ pervades Canberra and the picturesque reigns
triumphant. To view the city from Mt Ainslie, for instance, is to see it set against a
green backdrop mosaic of parklands, commercial timber plantations and
phosphate-saturated hillside paddocks, occasionally tempered by vestigial bush.
The sea of manicured turf emanating from Parliament House, cascading down its
earthen ramps and pulsing throughout the city’s ceremonial centre accentuates this
chromatic effect. As the city approaches its centenary, twenty-first century Canberra
uncannily resembles more the emerald green picturesque imagery of Coulter’s
1901 and 1911 ‘waterside capitals’ than it does the Griffins’ city. Yet, perhaps, it is
13
through departures from the Griffins’ vision, whether by intent or default, that the
city becomes ‘Australianised’. As water becomes increasingly scarce, however, the
triumph of the picturesque may prove to be short-lived.
Acknowledgements
The author expresses his appreciation to Dr Robert Freestone for his comments on an earlier version of this
essay. This paper owes its origins to stimulating conversations with Dr Dianne Firth, the authority on Lake
Burley Griffin. See her outstanding PhD dissertation ‘Behind the Landscape of Lake Burley Griffin:
Landscape, Water, Politics and the National Capital 1899-1964’ (University of Canberra, 2000).
1
See Proceedings of the Congress of Engineers, Architects, Surveyors and Others Interested in the Building
of the Federal Capital of Australia, Held in Melbourne, in May 1901 (Melbourne: J C Stephens, Printer,
1901).
2
Ibid, p 35.
3
Coulter, Charles, ‘An Ideal Federal City, Lake George, N.S.W.’, 1901, National Library of Australia, PIC
R134 LOC 2596.
4
Proceedings of the Congress of Engineers, Architects, Surveyors and Others Interested in the Building of
the Federal Capital of Australia, Held in Melbourne, in May 1901, p 36.
5
Elsewhere in the Proceedings, for instance, architect G Sydney Jones argued that the capital’s architecture
should ‘be essentially Australian’. Horticulturist C Bogue Luffmann advocated the planting of native species
and urged that ‘if we must have symbols, let us typify our own’.
6
Paul Carter, ‘Landscapes of Disappearance’, World Heritage Convention and Cultural Landscapes /
Sydney Opera House (Australia ICOMOS: 27 April 1995): 6; also see his seminal text The Road to Botany
Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (London: Faber and Faber, 1987). Also helpful on the picturesque in
Australia is Ken Taylor, ‘Colonial Picturesque: An Antipodean Claude Glass’, in Ann Hamblin (ed), Visions of
Future Landscapes: Proceedings of the Australian Academy of Science 1999, Fenner Conference on the
Environment, 2-5 May 1999, Canberra (Kingston, ACT: Bureau of Rural Sciences, 2000): 58-66.
7
Ibid, p 4.
8
Idid, p 6.
9
On the site selection process and related political battles, see Roger Pegrum’s excellent study, The Bush
Capital: How Australia Chose Canberra as Its Federal City (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger Pty Ltd, 1983).
10
After debate concerning the territory’s extent, NSW officially ‘surrendered’ it to the Commonwealth on 1
January 1911. See Jim Gibbney, Canberra: 1913-1953 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing
Service, 1988): 1-2. The national government would continue to own the land within the Australian Capital
Territory (ACT) and control its development through leases until the advent of a local government in 1989.
11
Instructions from Minister for Home Affairs in ‘Yass-Canberra Site for Federal Capital General (1908-09)
Federal Capital Site — Surrender of Territory for Seat of Government of the Commonwealth’, National
Archives of Australia (NAA: A110, FC1911/738 Part 1).
12
Information, conditions and particulars for guidance in the preparation of competitive designs for the
Federal Capital City of the Commonwealth of Australia ([Melbourne]: Printed and published for the
Government of the Commonwealth of Australia by J. Kemp, Government Printer for the State of Victoria,
1911).
14
13
On the competition see John W Reps, Canberra 1912: Plans and Planners of the Australian Capital
Competition (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997). For the Australian planning history context, see
Robert Freestone, Model Communities: the Garden City movement in Australia (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson
Australia, 1989) and Stephen Hamnett and Robert Freestone (eds), The Australian Metropolis: A Planning
History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2000).
14
For Walter’s own explanation of their design see his The Federal Capital: Report Explanatory of the
Preliminary General Plan (Melbourne: Albert J Mullett, Government Printer, 1914). This report is largely
derived from his original typescript explanation included with the competition submission. On Griffin as a
landscape architect and town planner see Christopher Vernon, ‘”Expressing natural conditions with
maximum possibility”: the American landscape art (1901-c 1912) of Walter Burley Griffin’, Journal of Garden
History 15, no 1 (1995):19-47. Also see Jeff Turnbull and Peter Navaretti (eds), The Griffins in Australia and
India: the complete works and projects of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin (Melbourne: The
Miegunyah Press of the Melbourne University Press, 1998) and Anne Watson (ed), Beyond Architecture:
Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin, America, Australia, India (Sydney: Powerhouse Publishing, 1998).
15
[Walter Burley Griffin], ‘The Plans for Australia’s New Capital City’, American City 7 (July 1912): 9.
16
For a definitive treatment of this Olmsted masterpiece see Walter L Creese, ‘The Boston Fens’, Chapter in
The Crowning of the American Landscape: Eight Great Spaces and Their Buildings (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1987): 167-204.
17
On this project see, for instance, Frank Keffer Balthis, ‘An Illinois school campus’, The American Botanist,
21 (1915), pp 1-8.
18
Anthony Hunt, ‘Landscape architecture in and about Chicago’, The Architectural Record, 32 (1912), p 53.
19
Balthis, ‘An Illinois school campus’, pp 2-3. The plan geometry also disguised the ‘incongruity’ manifested
by the convergence of two [extant] driveways approaching the building at right angles.’
20
Ibid, p 3.
21
D H Lawrence, Kangaroo (Pymble: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995 [original 1923]): 402.
22
See, for instance, Ken Taylor, ‘Picturesque Visions of a Nation: Capital City in the Garden’, The New
Federalist: Journal of Australian Federation History, no 3 (June 1999): 74-80.
23
The Griffins’ submission included the following renderings: plan of ‘City and Environs’; a triptych ‘View
from Summit of Mount Ainslie’ and sections of the ‘Northerly Side of Water Axis’ (4 panels), ‘Easterly Side of
Land Axis’ (4 panels) and a detail of the ‘Government Group’ on the ‘Southerly Side of Water Axis’. These
were accompanied by another plan drafted on the contour map supplied to competitors and a typescript
report.
24
‘Competitor number 10 WS Griffiths, RCG Coulter and CH Caswell. Perspective – view of the lake at
sunset, also showing the continuation of avenue over the railway line with stairways etc’, National Archives
of Australia (Item no 4185410, Series A710, Series accession A710/1).
25
Nonetheless, the Government later set aside the Griffins’ design and next appointed a ‘Departmental
Board’ to formulate a new plan derived from various competition submissions. Profoundly disappointed,
Walter resolved to have their plan reinstated. In an impassioned January 1913 letter to the Australian
government, he offered to explain the design in person. Delayed by a change of government, the
Commonwealth belatedly responded in July with an invitation for Walter to visit. In the interim, however,
construction of the now officially-named Canberra had begun to the Departmental Board’s hybrid design.
15
Arriving in August 1913, Walter toured the Canberra site and consulted with the Departmental Board and
other officials, including the new Prime Minister. Many local architects and building professionals were also
uneasy about the displacement of the winning entry and began a campaign to have his design reinstated.
This campaign, together with Griffin’s lobbying, met with success. In October, the Board was disbanded and
Walter accepted an official position as ‘Federal Capital Director of Design and Construction’.
26
L. W., ‘Canberra’, unknown periodical [newspaper cutting] (London): 151. (Mitchell Library collections,
State Library of New South Wales).
27
Political antagonisms led to a 1916 Royal Commission investigating the performance of his contract and
the implementation of the city plan. Griffin was exonerated.
28
For a more comprehensive overview of Canberra’s administration and design evolution see Paul Reid,
Canberra following Griffin: a design history of Australia’s national capital (Canberra: National Archives of
Australia, 2002) and K F Fischer’s classic Canberra: Myths and Models, Forces at work in the formation of
the Australian capital (Hamburg: Institute of Asian Affairs, 1984).
29
Report of the Senate Select Committee Appointed to Inquire into and Report upon the Development of
Canberra (Government Printer, 1955).
30
Ibid. Also see Harrison’s own monograph on Griffin, Peter Harrison (Robert Freestone, ed), Walter Burley
Griffin: Landscape Architect (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1995).
31
William Holford, Observations on the Future Development of Canberra, ACT (Government Printer,
Canberra, 1957): p 6.
32
For an excellent exposition of the political symbolism underpinning the Griffins’ Canberra design, see
James Weirick, ‘The Griffins and Modernism’, Transition (Melbourne) 24 (Autumn 1988): pp 5-13.
33
William Holford, Observations on the Future Development of Canberra, ACT (Government Printer,
Canberra, 1957): p 10.
34
Bryson, Bill. Down Under (London: Doubleday, 2000), p 120.
35
Ibid, p. 135
16