Retelling the story of Canberra

Has Canberra evolved into the city that Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin envisaged?

This is the question I will be exploring, alongside fellow panellists Dr Dianne Firth, an academic at the University of Canberra, and journalist Chris Uhlmann, at an event for the National Capital Authority this week.

More than one hundred years on, the short answer is inevitably: ‘no’. But thank goodness Canberra wasn’t limited to a plan laid out more than a century ago.

Cities are layers of narrative. Those layers of narrative or nuance are what make cities joyful, dynamic and interesting places. To think that our city’s story must remain the same as the one first told in 1912 is a strange idea indeed.

The world was a very different place when Walter and Marion laid out their vision for Canberra. The international design competition for the nation’s capital was launched in April 1911 and closed in January 1912. Let’s pause for a moment and think back to 1912.

There was no internet, mobile phones or personal computers. Passenger aircraft were a few years away and space travel decades off in the distance. Two world wars were yet to occur. It would take another decade before a woman would be elected to an Australian parliament and Aboriginal people were considered part of the native flora and fauna. No one had heard of climate change. Obesity wasn’t an epidemic. And the population of the entire country was 4.7 million – fewer than the number of people who live in Sydney today.

Any city is a real-time experiment. This is especially so in a century of exponential change. We must learn from the past, and also have a vision for the future, but that can’t be set in stone, because the future is notoriously difficult to predict.

Just two years after the competition for Canberra closed, World War I broke out and Griffin was required to reduce the scope of his plans. The vision for Canberra was reimagined and remoulded to suit the times. Ever wondered why there is Northbourne Avenue but no Westbourne, Southbourne or Eastbourne avenues? They were scrapped when budgets were redirected towards the war effort.

Under the Griffins’ plan, there would have been a ziggurat, or pyramid, in the place of Parliament House. Anzac Parade’s wide boulevard would have led to a dance hall not a war memorial. We would have had a tram network and lake-edge apartments decades earlier. And the mountains surrounding Canberra would have sprouted flowers in spring, with Black Mountain covered in yellow, Mount Ainslie in pink and white, and Mount Mugga Mugga in blue.

We’ll never know what the couple thought of how Canberra has evolved. Walter died of peritonitis in 1937 while in India to oversee the completion of a library at the University of Lucknow. Marion, one of the first licensed female architects in the world, died in 1961 – although her beautifully rendered images of the prized winning design for Canberra live on in the National Capital Exhibition.

Canberra’s foundation stones, resting upon the ideas of the City Beautiful and the Garden City, are still visible. We have the grand axial design of wide boulevards interspersed with parks, monuments and human-scale buildings. In many ways, Canberra has met Walter’s ideal of “the city of the future”. But to incorporate those ideas into the future means striking a balance between the Griffins’ original vision and our contemporary needs and values.

We can reach back in time to find evidence in the Griffins’ papers and documents to support any argument. We can interpret the Griffins’ intentions any way we choose. But that denies the city to the chance to be reimagined. My view is that we must respect the heritage of our planned capital and its centrality to the Garden City movement. But Canberra must also respond to the needs of its citizens – people who still hunger for a “city beautiful” but whose lives are being played out in the 21st century.

the essentials

?What: Has Canberra evolved into the city that Walter and Marion envisaged?: Panel discussion and National Capital Exhibition preview

Where: National Capital Exhibition, Barrine Drive, Regatta Point 

When: 6 pm Tuesday 11 September 2018 

How much: $11

Web: www.eventbrite.com.au/e/national-capital-exhibition