Canberra, Capital of Australia

Canberra is a big country town. It’s also the capital city of Australia. Some call it a country Washington DC. The typical population of Canberra is about 250,000 (that’s the size of Sioux Falls, SD!) but most people who live here leave town for the month of January for summer holiday, so this week it feels like the population is more like 50,000.

We took a tour of the Parliament building on Wednesday. The original parliament building was intended to be temporary and was built in the early 1900s. The plan was to replace it by 1950, but it was 1988 before the senators and members of parliament were seated in the new building on the crest of the hill.

Actually, the new building was more so in the hill, as it is covered with grass on its sloping sides. This was to be a reminder that land and country were above, and more important, than the politicians “running” it.

The outside patio was red dirt, also a reminder of country, with a water feature surrounding it, and an aboriginal pattern mosaic centering it all.

The design of the inside entryway, a large open vestibule with 48 green marble clad pillars, was to evocate a eucalyptus gum tree forest. The marble was imported from Italy because it was believed that Australian marble would be less durable. It may also have been a reflection of the fact that it was a consortium of Italian architects that won the design competition.

The architecture and interior design made the building feel more like an art gallery than the nation’s capital. The location and sight lines of the building make it part of a larger whole. It lines up on an axis with the War Memorial across Lake Burley Griffin. In the lake is a memorial to Captain Cook, credited for discovering Australia. The memorial is in the form of a water jet that shoots 450 feet into the air from 2-4 each day.

From the grass on top of the capital building, war memorial in the distance

 

View of the water jet from the other side of the lake

The lake is named after Burley Griffin, a Chicago architect who laid out a master plan for the development of the entire city in 1911.  A new capital was to be built, to end the rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney. Conditions were that it must be located in New South Wales but had to be farther than 80 miles from Sydney. Canberra was the chosen site, and Griffin the chosen architect.

The Parliament building is divided into two houses – the Senate and the House of Representatives. They call their government Washminster because it’s a combination of US and UK structures. The house is decorated all in green and the senate is red. There is some historical rationale but now they say that the green is for their gum trees and the red is for the soil of the country’s interior.

Outside of the original parliament house, now the Museum of Australian Democracy, there is an ongoing demonstration camp by aboriginal Australians, the original custodians of the land. Indigenous people have been protesting at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy since 1972.

Keeping the fires burning

View of the original parliament building from the protest site

After the Parliament tour, we investigated Australia’s High Court – their Supreme Court. Again, the architecture was more art than institution. All of the building materials were sourced from the Australian states, to represent inclusiveness and equality. Six states or territories contributed distinct wood for the interior, but South Australia had no trees, likely due to historic over clearing of land, so it is represented by local granite lining a water pool along the entryway path of travel.

South Australia granite on your left

Inside the first floor

One of the courtrooms

Our walk home was along Lake Griffin, and across it, to downtown residential and business precincts. Public art continued to greet us at every turn, be it the presence of buildings and their ornamentation, statuary, plantings, viewpoints, and the flow of the city’s design.