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A sort of mythical thing: Canberra as an imaginary

capital
a b
Laurie Duggan
a
Teaches Arts , Monash universitie
b
Teaches Arts , Sydney universitie
Published online: 18 May 2009.

To cite this article: Laurie Duggan (1998) A sort of mythical thing: Canberra as an imaginary capital, Journal of Australian
Studies, 22:57, 83-92, DOI: 10.1080/14443059809387383

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14443059809387383

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 'A Sort of Mythical Thing': Canberra as an
Imaginary Capital

Laurie Duggan

I do not know whether one should regret or rejoice at the absurdity, but the adminis-
tration decided to forget Goyaz ... [i]t was all too small and too old. A completely
virgin territory would have to be found for the establishment of the gigantic scheme
that was now envisaged. This territory was discovered a hundred kilometres to the
east, in the form of a plateau covered with nothing but coarse grass and thorn bushes,
as if it had been struck by a plague which had destroyed all the fauna and stunted the
vegetation. No railway or road led to it; only tracks fit for carts. A symbolic square,
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a hundred kilometres long on each side, was marked out on the map of the area. This
was to be the site of the federal district, in the centre of which the future capital would
be built. As there was no irregularity of surface to worry the architects, they could
work on the site as if it were a drawing-board. The plan of the town was marked out
on the ground; they drew the boundary, and inside it, the different areas, residential,
administrative, business, industrial, even the one devoted to entertainment... From
one day to the next, the papers were full of notices announcing the founding of the
city of Goiania. A detailed plan was given, as if the town were a hundred years old,
and alongside it were enumerated the advantages the inhabitants could look forward
toroads, railway, water supply, sewers and cinemas... I visited Goiania in 1937. On
an endless plain, half vacant lot and half battlefield, bristling with electric cable poles
and survey posts, were a hundred or so new buildings, scattered in all directions.
The largest was the hotel, a cube of cement which, in the surrounding flatness,
looked like an air-terminal... [N]either history, nor the passage of time nor custom had
filled its emptiness or softened its stiffness; like a station or a hospital, it was a place
of transit not of residence.1

Some fifteen years of muddle preceded the final endorsement of Canberra as the
site for Australia's national capital. Section 125 of the new constitution had specified
that the capital should be sited within NSW but not less than 100 miles from Sydney.
Possible locations had included Dalgety, Albury, Armidale, Orange and Tumut as
well as the Lake George/Canberra region, and Dalgety had even been proclaimed
an official site, requiring a parliamentary act to be altered when the new area was
chosen.2 In April 1911 King O 'Malley, the minister for home affairs, announced a
competition for the design of the new capital.3 Each competitor was supplied with
a small wooden crate containing entry conditions, topographic maps, geological reports
and lists of specified buildings to be marked on each plan.4 These buildings included,
in addition to governmental structures, a national art gallery, national library, national
museum and national theatre ('ornamental waters', parks and gardens, and transport
networks were also stipulated).5 Reproductions of two eight-foot cycloramic
watercolours by Robert Coulter translated the site's statistics into physical detail.
These were in turn supplemented by contour models displayed in London, Washington,
New York, Chicago, Paris, Berlin, Ottawa, Cape Town and Wellington.6

83
 Laurie Duggan

Hardly any of the entrants of the 1912 competition included all of the specified
features in their plans. Many of them even chose to ignore the topography, treating
the brief as a licence to produce Utopian diagrams, modules which could, in theory,
be placed anywhere, but which, in practice were impracticable (G V F Mann's
circular city is an example). Some, like Bernard Maybeck produced purely fanciful
images, Piranesian structures which would have proven altogether impossible to
translate into built form. Other, more sophisticated designers, produced works which
carried within them the urban archetypes of other places and other ages. Alfred
Agache's plan, impressive in its attention to detail, is very much the model of a
working city (including an airport, a gasworks, a cold storage facility, even a lunatic
asylum). Nevertheless it suggests nothing more than the transplantation of a
Haussmannized Paris of the belle epoque. Robert Coulter, the Sydney planner
who had prepared the two cycloramas, presented as his own entry a pastiche of
world architectures gothic and baroque spires and campaniles, Greek facades,
Wren-like major governmental buildings, obelisks and pagodastruly a white city
setting. Eliel Saarinen's entry is industrialised neo-classicism, a fantasy of sheer
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power which nonetheless carries the sense that it could never have become more
than a ruin; an improbable relic of totalitarianism in the Australian bush.
Two broad tendencies are observable in the competition entries: one which,
deliberately or otherwise, seeks to recreate the old world in the new, and another
purely Utopian mode which seeks to remove altogether the memory-traces of any
pre-existing city. Modernity's drive to produce a homogeneous environment7 is
visible in examples of both tendencies, accomplished either through total erasure or
through the totalitarian adherence to an unvarying neoclassical paradigm.
Many of the contestants, including the three placed leaders, Griffin, Saarinen and
Agache, held the belief that the city could be conceived of as a single work of art.8
And Griffin's plan for the university does, within his wider scheme, make use of a
Utopian set of concentric circles.' Yet the Griffin entry stands alone in its topographical
awareness. This cognisance of local geography removes the Griffins plan from the
realm of purely 'ideal cities', those grids which are supposedly 'universal' but which
tend to assume like Le Corbusier's vision, a flat surface.10 Even so, the plan makes
use of particular landscape features (Mt Ainslie, Mt Bimberi, Parliament and Capitol
Hills) as coordinates for an urban style which has little room for the intimate aspects
of the country around it. For the relationship of Canberra to its physical environment
is strictly symbolic: there is no meaningful 'hinterland' to speak of. Instead, the
capital functions as a kind of displaced suburb of Sydney or Melbourne (even its
major newspapers come from elsewhere). The Griffins plan for the city was unusual
among the entries in the 1912 competition in that it referred to local geographical
features. But it did not (and could not) deal with the way the city's projected life
might engage with the surrounding landscape. Canberra is nonetheless, as planned
cities go, a relatively successful experiment. This may be the product of its hybrid
nature: an almost inadvertent blending of the grand manner and the garden city
ideal:

From Capitol Hill to the present War Memorial... is two and one-quarter miles... The
mountains in the immediate vicinity rise 1,000 feet above the ornamental waters. From
[them]... one can see mile upon mile of plains, broad prairies and hills. As a backdrop
the blue-green Australian Alps ... rise in the distance."

84
 'A Sort of Mythical Thing'

The author of this description, Donald Leslie Johnson, suggests that the other
contestants in the competition had failed to grasp the scale, horizontal and vertical,
of the land. 'Their plans were tight, very urban' he adds, because '[t]heir referent
was the typical northern industrial city'.12
The Griffins overall plan makes use of scale in the grand manner, linking the
city's nodes of government, commerce, and the military with broad avenues and
sweeping vistas. It is a plan whose models include Louis XTV's Versailles and the
McMillan plan which sought to revitalise L'Enfant's original Washington design. It
takes from the latter its central axis (Washington's Mall) and repeats its central
geometric form the equilateral triangle on an even larger scale.13 Within its
grand sweep, however, there is a domestic rather than authoritarian feeling to the
design and perhaps this is due to the Griffins not having complete control of its
component architectures.14
Griffin was constrained here by the project itself, and it is to their credit that the
opportunity to plan an entire city from scratch a more or less unprecedented
historical opening15 should have resulted in such a durable model.16 Yet there is
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still, about the national capital, some sense of the arbitrary. In general the national
city, says Stephen Barber, 'is constructed from the heaviest, densest materials (marble,
lead) to pin down and prostrate the territory which is gathered into nationality, to
give that territory a centre which magnetizes all trajectories in that territory'.17
Canberra evinces none of this weightiness. Perhaps it is fortunate that Griffin was
not concerned, beyond the stipulations of maximum height and building location,
with the architectural detail of the city. The (assumed) tabula rasa of the site was
the occasion for a more democratic, though not an ad hoc approach to planning.
Generally, as Charles Jencks says, the Utopian rigidity of modernist architecture, as
evidenced in the British new towns or in cities like Brasilia, creates further problems:
'the new creation, however imaginative', is oversimplified and lacks 'the complexity
of life and the continuity with the past that any old, bungled city, with all its faults,
possesse[s]'.18 'Human diversity', notes Richard Sennett, 'seems something beyond
the powers of human design'." Of Brasilia in particular (Oscar Niemeyer's model
of totalitarian absurdity), Henri Lefebvre suggests '[s]o faithfully is technocratic
and state-bureaucratic society projected into the space ... that there is an almost
self-consciously comic aspect to the process'.20
The Griffin plan and its practical workings-out produced a city in which there is
an uneasy but perhaps fortunate balance between an earlier baroque aesthetic (the
grand manner) and the newer visions of the garden city. The grand manner is, Spiro
Kostof argues, 'an urbanism of dominion... about empires and their capital outlets
... about the staging of power'.21 While the garden city ideal, together with modernism
' downplay [s] or rej ect[s] a monumental public realm, the Grand Manner celebrate[s]
it ... [it is] synonymous with the city as a work of art'.22 William Davidge, an
English commentator on the competition, felt that the Griffin plan 'violated garden
city thought' in its failure to make use of irregular streets which would conceal
rather than exhibit vast distances and in its failure to include an agricultural belt.23
Curved streets and culs-de-sac were indeed introduced to later developments in
the capital, but their use as major elements of the Griffin plan would have worked
against its authors' intentions. 'Curved streets', Frederick Law Olmstead had written,
' imply leisure, contemplativeness and happy tranquillity', hardly the dramatic qualities
of straight streets which imply an 'eagerness to press forward'.24 The 'reciprocity

85
 Laurie Duggan

of sight' of L'Enfant's straight avenues signified, in his terms, 'the openness and
scrutiny, the enlightened critique and rational judgement that must prevail in the
public sphere of a democracy'.25 Griffin had indeed used the physical features of
the site for largely dramatic purposes and had treated these prospects as those of a
seat of government. Nevertheless he had noted:

The Australian Commonwealth, with no historically-evolved suitable architectural

style, but with unique scope in its unlimited open continent for national growth, with
this virgin city under unified control, and possessed of modern building science,
appliances and materials, is in a position to exact unity in plan and homogeneity in
expression and harmony with the whole natural environment beyond any ordinary
opportunity. Since the city is to evolve gradually, the desired unity cannot be assured
by personality, nor can it under popular government be established by authoritative
decree of any arbitrary type.26

Griffin's plan was, of course, compromised to a much greater degree than he

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would have been happy with. Almost as soon as it was proclaimed the winning
entry in the 1912 competition, O'Malley's department began to combine with it the
elements of other designs.27 Griffin was to work on site and as an adviser for
several fraught and generally unsatisfactory years. In February 1921, the federal
capital advisory committee (or 'Sulman committee') prepared a program for the
capital to be realised on a tight budget. Instead of focussing on monumental buildings,
plans for the first three-year stage stipulated that the city should be 'regarded in the
early period of its existence more as a Garden Town, the erection of the permanent
buildings being deferred... until economic conditions might be more favourable'.28
By 1927, the year in which the national government was finally located in the
capital:

the white-painted, stucco, provisional Parliament House, its siting vehemently

opposed by Griffin even after he had left Canberra, faced the War Memorial across
almost two miles of paddocks, where sheep grazed. Framing the centre, the outlines
of the extensive plan, the result of Griffin's programme of road cuttings and
embankments, carried out between 1917 and 1920, were discernible. They had been
supported by an ambitious programme of tree planting but, ironically, it was the
extension of this work, developed over a period of two decades from 1930, that helped
to further erode the axial order of the plan. The Griffins' distinction between parkland
on the outer reaches being wild, and in inner areas formalised, was irrevocably lost.29

As this observation of a later (sympathetic) writer inadvertently suggests, the

erosion of the plan may have had some of its sources in the plan itself, for while the
idea ofblending the city into its environment through landscaping seemed an attractive
move, the landscape around the capital was hardly pristine even in 1912. In practice
how does a rational and ceremonial plan integrate itself with grazing land? Griffin
seems to wish to apply 'organic' notions to both the internal ('materials used',
'irrelevant features') and external relationships ('site conditions') of the capital when
he noted:

[I]t is desired that the standard of design be the expression of actual functions through
practical organic planning; through the direct adaption of the inherent characteristics

86
 'A Sort of Mythical Thing'

of the materials used, avoiding intrusion of irrelevant features, however time-honoured,

on the one hand, or individual on the other; arid through recognition of the peculiar
site conditions.30

Theterm, 'organic' conceals a notoriously slippery set of architectural notions. 'Truth

to materials' and the awareness of local particularities do not necessarily coexist
easily with each other or with the notion of the city itself as an 'organism'. Expression
of the capital's 'actual functions' might be a very difficultproject to slip unobtrusively
into the texture of the Monaro region. Henri Lefebvre suggests of insecure institutions
that they tend to describe themselves as 'organic': 'The ideological appeal to the
organism', he says, 'is by extension an appeal to a unity, and beyond that unity... to
an origin deemed to be known with absolute certainty... an origin that legitimates
and justifies'.31
Responsible for these simplifications is the reductionism which finds its form in
the map, the model or diorama. In Lefebvre's terms 'social space' has been reduced
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to 'mental space' through 'scientific' methods which are themselves veils for
ideology.32 The architect's procedures of coding and decoding through drawing
seem to be transparent but in reality act as filters, eliminating some aspects of the
site as they invent others.33 Maps and plans concern themselves (in William James's
terms) with 'domains of meaning' which are often contradictory but which may be
'attended to one at a time as "the real'" although with each shift of attention, as
James suggests 'the reality lapses with the attention'.34 'It is a terrible thing' noted
the Viennese architect Adolf Loos, 'when an architectural drawing, itself a graphic
work of art, is built in stone, steel, and glass, for there are truly graphic artists among
the architects'.35 Loos' somewhat cryptic comment may well apply to the relatively
new 'science' oftown planning, its beautiful designs and carefully constructed models.
For the space of the diagram or the model is always the space of a different domain
of meaning and the shift from pencil to bulldozer is not simply a change of tool for a
change of scale. Without miniaturisation, 'visionary' town planning would be an
impossibility. But the very act of model-making may, in advance, doom the project.
For the builder of 'model cities', like the more modest builder of model ships, indulges
a nostalgic desire to control every aspect of production; a desire (in the model ship
builder's case) to exercise 'craft' rather than simply perform, as alienated labourer,
a task on a production line.36 This nostalgia may (in the architect's case) result in an
attempt to recover the imagined city of a previous era or, at least, produce a 'modem'
(or modernist) city even a 'city of the future' from a set of unexamined
concepts which will, in practice, bind a society even more tightly to the real or
imaginary past.37
Certain forms of beauty do not lend themselves to changes of scale. The 'artists
impression' of a shopping mall or city street functions as a kind of mirage vision, a
spectral edge opening out from the plan or map, where everything is cleaner and
simpler. Suburbia begins here. And the city of Canberra is at least in some
respectsvery suburban. Writing of Nicolai Chernyshevsky (and implicitly of Le
Corbusier), Marshall Berman observes how the adventure of modernism is
transformed into the modernist nightmare when it becomes a routine procedure.
The wonder of Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace evaporates when it becomes 'a
vision of a future world that consists exclusively of crystal palaces':

87
 Laurie Duggan

[This] is the dream of modernism without urbanism. The new antithesis to the city is
no longer the primitive countryside, but a highly developed, super-technological,
self-contained exurban world, comprehensively planned and organized because
created ex nihilo on virgin soilmore thoroughly controlled and administered, and
hence 'more pleasant and advantageous,' than any modern metropolis could ever
be."

The suburb ends up by denying the very space its originators regard as salubrious.
It escapes the over-crowded city centre and establishes gardens and parks (the
'lungs of the city') as buffers. Yet, Lewis Mumford says:

[a]s soon as the suburban garden pattern became universal, the virtues it at first
boasted began to disappear.... As the city crept nearer the suburbs, the rural note
vanished: presently the suburbanite had the advantages of neither society nor
solitude. Even in the nineteenth century, the social weaknesses of the suburb were
apparent: one paid a heavy price for fresh air.39
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The metaphor of organism serves as a pretext for the dismemberment of functions

and their placement in separate 'zones'. Rapidity of transport creates on the map
an illusion of efficiency since it is easy on a two (or three) dimensional model to plot
'networks' in isolation. When the road (the link between functions) takes over as
the generator of urban design it reduces other aspects of city life to the level of
ciphers. Roads in this modem sense turn out to be at odds with the urb; they exist
to serve the state, not necessarily the community.40
I want to return now to the notion of' legibility', that quality implicitly denied by
Adolf Loos, which underlies so many architectural projects. What do we actually
mean when we talk of an urban space that it is 'legible'? Who actually 'reads' the
city? In one sense, our navigations in an urban area are 'readings'; familiar or
evocative points enable us to find our way through, approach or avoid certain areas.
But deciphering this shorthand of signs is not an activity of the same level as 'reading'
the axial plan of a city like Canberra.
On the Griffin plan we can pick out the major features which have been more or
less retained in the present city: the axis from Mt Ainslie which runs through the
war memorial and the parliamentary buildings; the triangle of government, commerce,
and the military; and the shape, crossing both of these forms, of Lake Burley Griffin.
These features are not made 'legible' simply as directional clues (though they could
be used as such). They represent (or are meant to represent) instead, a symbolic
order underlying the day to day functioning of the city. They are also features
which are more clearly perceptible from the air, or at least from one or two prominent
positions. From Mt Ainslie the central axis can be seen to run through the shape of
the war memorial (partly concealed by the trees on the mountain slope), the old
parliament house (now a memorial itself: to government), and the new parliament
building, submerged like an iceberg on Capitol Hill (and what do we read from
this?).41
Mostly this grand plan exists, 'on the ground', as a memorised map in the minds
of taxi drivers. We could, if we wished to read it, consider the 'precincts' it
establishes, educational, military, legal and so on. But, save for the representation of
power and its superficial lines of communication, the notion of the 'precinct' is from
a metalanguage which makes sense only in the other-dimensional space of town

88
 'A Sort of Mythical Thing'

planning. Its practical absurdity is demonstrated in the ideal of the 'arts precinct', a
space, such as the one in Melbourne, which assumes its visiting population will wish
to be able to move between the art gallery, the theatre and the opera house as
quickly as possible, preferably on the one day or afternoon.
Beneath these layers of symbolic spaces a landscape can be easily lost as a
version of Henri Lefebvre's 'absolute space' is constructed:

Absolute space [is] made up offragmentsof nature located at sites which [are] chosen
for their intrinsic qualities (cave, mountain top, spring, river), but whose very
consecration end[s] up by stripping them of their natural characteristics and
uniqueness. Thus natural space [is] soon populated by political forces. Typically,
architecture pick[s] a site in nature and transfer[s] it to the political realm by means of
a symbolic mediation; one thinks, for example, of the statues of local gods or goddesses
in Greek temples...42

There is evidence of a further symbolic influence at work in the Griffins' Canberra

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plans, those peculiarly early twentieth-century elements of what could be termed

'practical' (or muscular) mysticism. Griffin himself, in his last comments on Canberra
(1934) referred to the 'threefold Commonwealth' principles of Rudolf Steiner and
the need to reconcile 'Esthetic, Economic and Ethic objectives with the... accepted
ideals of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality'.43 Anthroposophical and theosophical
ideals were certainly in the air, and Griffin may have imbibed them as early as 1893,
at the Chicago World's Fair,44 but to deduce the entirety of the Canberra plan from
them as one author has done may involve placing too strong a reliance on Griffin's
and particularly Marion Mahony' s later writings.45 Many influences may be traced
from the 1912 competition entry, though it would seem decidedly at a remove from
any theosophical or anthroposophical vision to place on the plan's central axis a
'casino' (the subsequent location of the Australian War Memorial).46
Even if it were possible to substantiate an anthoposophical reading of the capital,
it would still exist unless the reader wished to make on the spot decisions based
on geomancy as a purely abstract possibility; a possibility which relates more
closely to the model, the map, or to Marion Mahony's beautiful screened images,
than it does to the living city. 'Legibility' in these metaphorical (as opposed to
metonymic) applications, and the living city, exist in different spaces; different domains
of sense.47
The problems of Canberra are the problems brought about by 'visionary' (as
opposed to regulatory?) town planning. The city has become finally an ironic capital
in which the idealism of its design coexists with the practical inconvenience of its
pragmatic location. It is a city which looks like a suburb although its dormitory
functions are often short-term. Politicians fly in and out from elsewhere. When the
children of the administrators grow up, they leave. A city which rarely holds among
its population families of more than two generations is a purely modem phenomenon.
The absurdity of the project was sensed as early as 1916 or so, when John
Murdoch, chief architect of the government's works branch, confessed: 'the Federal
Capital to me has always been a sort of mythical thing; rightly or wrongly, I cannot
enthuse over it. I never did enthuse over it. I would like to see it strangled for 100
years'.48 Murdoch's misgivings were echoed in the 1940s, a period when the

89
 Laurie Duggan

prospects of the new capital were at a low ebb, by Marjorie Barnard and Flora
Eldershaw, who wrote in their novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow:

On the floor of a tranquil valley, almost encircled by the blue wall of the Australian
Alps, across the brown and silver paddocks watered by the Molonglo, architects
with compass and set square had laid down the design for a city. It was to be the
perfect modern capital, rootless, blameless, minutely regulated, of a partyless
unsectarian beauty... It was a shame that human beings should live there at all... 49

(Editor's note: Beyond Architecture: Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin
in America and India, an exhibition focussing on the Griffins' architectural work is
showing at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, 22 July 1998 to 2 May 1999.)

Endnotes
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1 Claude Lvi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans J & D Weightman, New York, 1992, pp 125-26.
2 Gavin Souter, Lion and Kangaroo: Australia 1901-1919, The Rise of a Nation, Sydney, 1976, pp
169-70.
3 The official launch of the competition was on 24 May 1911. Peter Harrison, Walter Burley Griffin:
Landscape Architect, Robert Freestone (ed.), Canberra, 1995, p 7.
4 John W Reps, 'Forgotten Plans and Neglected Designers: A New Look at the Australian Federal
Capital Competition' in An Ideal City?: The 1912 Competition to Design Canberra, Canberra,
1995, p 7.
5 Peter Ward, 'The Visions Splendid', The Australian Magazine, 3-4 June 1995, pp 48-49.
6 Harrison, op. cit., p 7.
7 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, New York, 1988,
p 68.
8 Reps, op. cit., p 12.
9 Jeremy Turnbull, 'Griffin, Mahony and Canberra', Melbourne University Gazette, Spring, 1995,
pp 10-11.
10 Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret), 'A Contemporary City' (1929), in Richard T LeGates
and Frederic Stout (eds), The City Reader, London, 1996, p 369.
11 Donald Leslie Johnson, Australian Architecture 1901-51: Sources of Modernism, Sydney, 1980,
p 28.
12 Ibid.
13 Harrison, op. cit., pp 29-30.
14 Griffin did ensure however that the capital avoid the construction of tall buildings, suggesting that
rapidity of communication and a liberal use of space would render them unnecessary. See Harrison,
op. cit., p 30.
15 'The Canberra competition occurred just as modern town planning took form', Reps, op. cit., p 6.
What needs to be noted here is that the city was not simply a ceremonial or palatial location like
Versailles so there were few if any real precedents. Tony Garnier's plans for a 'Cit Industrielle'
had been substantially completed by 1904 but had to wait until 1918 for publication. See Reyner
Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, Cambridge, Mass., 1980, p 37.
16 And so immediately noteworthy: according to Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler saw Canberra, along
with Washington and Karlsruhe as an example to follow in the proposed replanning of Berlin.
Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History, Boston, 1991, p
273.
17 Stephen Barber, Fragments of the European City, London, 1995, p 51. T J Clark suggests that the
solidity of Haussmann's forms for Paris were intended 'to give modernity a shape' Paris, he says,
'was becoming a spectacle'. (T J Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and
his Followers, Princeton, 1986, p 66.) But Paris was an old play with an already existing script.
In Australia the sets were being built before the script had been finalised.
18 Quoted in Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence,

90
 'A Sort of Mythical Thing'

Kitsch, Postmodernism , Durham, 1987, p 282.

19 Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities, New York, 1992,
p 98.
20 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (trans Donald Nicholson-Smith), Oxford, 1991, p 312.
21 Kostof, op. cit., p 271.
22 Ibid., pp 217-18.
23 Though he revised his opinion after visiting Australia. Robert Freestone, Model Communities:
The Garden City Movement in Australia, Melbourne, 1989, pp 118-21.
24 Quoted in Kostof, op. cit., p 271.
25 M Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory, Its Historical Imagery and Architectural
Entertainments, Cambridge, Mass., 1994, p 362.
26 W B Griffin, quoted in Harrison, op. cit., pp 36-7.
27 The departmental board's plan resembled W Scott Griffiths' entry though there was no
acknowledgement. Johnson, op. cit., p 21.
28 Harrison, op. cit., p 68.
29 Peter Proudfoot, The Secret Plan of Canberra, Sydney, 1994, p 99. Also lost was Griffin's idea
of Capitol Hill as the site for a ceremonial or archival structure rather than the parliamentary
structure selected for the site in 1974. 'Griffin's report was quite clear on this point. Parliament
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House was to be located on Camp Hill, a spur of Capitol Hill, on the land axis 80 feet below the
Hill, but 50 feet above the terraces of government buildings within the Parliamentary Triangle'.
Harrison, op. cit., p 35.
30 Quoted in Harrison, op. cit., pp 36-7.
31 Lefebvre, 1991, op. cit., pp 274-75.
32 Ibid., p 106.
33 Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, Eleonore Kofman & Elizabeth Lebas (trans. & ed.), Oxford,
1996, p 191.
34 Quoted in Susan Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature, Baltimore,
1989, p 15.
35 Quoted in Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, Cambridge,
Mass., 1994, p 65. Interestingly, as Colomina shows, Loos' own architectural plans are rough and
rudimentary compared to Le Corbusier's careful archives of finely detailed preparatory work.
'Loos is saying that the house must not be conceived of as a work of art, that there is a difference
between a house and a "series of decorated rooms'" (Colomina, op. cit., p 252). The loss of Loo's
distinction might be illustrated by the fate of Auguste Choisy's monumental Histoire del'Architecture
(1899), which made use throughout of isometric drawings which presented plan, section and
elevation in a single image. These immediately comprehensible diagrams were, says Reyner
Banham, 'So convincing... that even the obituarist of the builder, who is elsewhere critical... failed
to observe that they are pure abstractions, and don't deal with such facts as what the building looks
like to an observer inside it or in front of it. Nevertheless, it was almost certainly this quality of
abstraction, of a logical construct rather than the accidents of appearance ... that endeared these
illustrations to the generation born in the eighteen-eighties, the generation which ... perfected
Abstract art' (Banham, op. cit., pp 24-5).
36 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection,
Durham, NC, 1993, p 58.
37 This process of simplification may be observed in the creation of 'heritage' areas, where the
'history effect' turns a living suburb into a theme park.
38 Berman, op. cit., pp 243-44.
39 Lewis Mumford, The City in History, Harmondsworth, 1966, p 559. Mumford adds elsewhere:
'[T]he ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform
environment from which escape is impossible'. (Mumford, op. cit., p 553).
40 John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time, New Haven, 1994, p 7.
41 We could also map out the Melbourne of a few years ago as a city on intersecting axes whose
cardinal points were the State Houses of Parliament (Authority), Spencer St Railway Station
(Flight), the Shrine of Remembrance (Memory) and the Carlton and United Brewery (Oblivion).
42 Lefebvre, op. cit., p 48.
43 W B Griffin, quoted in Harrison, op. cit., p 73.
44 Australian theosophists were represented at the fair in a parliament of religions (see Jill Roe,

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 Laurie Duggan

Beyond Belief: Theosophy in Australia 1879-1939, Sydney, 1986, p 84.)

45 Proudfoot, op. cit. The author seems to rely most heavily on Marion Mahony Griffin's memoir
Magic of America, written after W B Griffin's death, circa 1940-1949. Marion had joined the
Anthroposophical Society in 1930 (or 1929 according to Roe, op. cit., pp 312-13) and Walter a
year later (Meredith Walker, Adrienne Kabos and James Weirick, Building for Nature: Walter
Barley Griffin and Castlecrag, Castlecrag, 1994, p 30) but they had certainly been theosophists
before this. Castlecrag, as opposed to Canberra, was clearly informed by these philosophies.
46 An anonymous article in The Salon includes a caricatured map of a departmental board 'final plan'
in which the casino has become 'The Barracks'. The University, situated where the Civic Centre
now is is labelled as 'cut off from civilization'. An island is marked 'Water Police Island for Storing
Drowned MPs, Professors, Senators' ('Canberra', The Salon: Journal of the Institute of Architects
of New South Wales, vol 1/5, March-April 1913, p 306).
47 The persistence of these architectural habits may be noted in the rise of (yet another) New
Urbanism. The ABC program Background Briefing (12 November 1996) ran an item on new
garden suburb/new town thought in the USA and Australia. The buzzwords for a new development
at St Mary's (Sydney's outer west) were 'ecological sustainability'. Yet the imagery the developers
used seemed to come from an unexamined nostalgic vision of the suburb where you could 'walk to
the comer shop'. Race, class and gender were not referred to. The metaphor of the town plan, as
I am contending, may be a 'dead metaphor' from its inception, having played out its metaphorical
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nature even before the bulldozers arrive on the site. At the planning/conceptual stage the metaphor
may be all that holds the project together it may be a faked coherence; on the ground, its results
are simply a set of circumstances the inhabitants of a city have to deal with.
48 From Home Affairs Departmental files. Quoted in Harrison, op. cit., p 46.
49 M Barnard Eldershaw, Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Melbourne, 1947, p 94

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