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.
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| From the grass on top of the capital building, war memorial in the distance |
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| 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.
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| Keeping the fires burning |
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| 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.
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| South Australia granite on your left |
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| Inside the first floor |
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| 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.
