The temperature in Canberra this morning was a chilly 3 degrees centigrade, although a warmer 4 degrees inside our caravan. However when the sun is shining and the magpies noisy with song, it doesn’t take long to warm up and get into the swing of the day.
After making contact with the camp office and learning that we had set up camp in the area reserved for big rigs, we booked in for a week and moved across to another spot, an annoying task but we are now well settled ready to stay as long as needed.
We spent the morning exploring the satellite suburb of Gungahlin, north of the exhibition centre here, buying our daily newspaper, some fresh vegetables and new windscreen wiper blades, calling into our bank, and most importantly buying diesel. I do believe that this morning’s purchase of 101.07 litres is a record; however the price per litre was better than we have seen coming north from the Victorian border.
Gungahlin is amazing; it is exactly like a concept plan off a drawing board, with the wide streets, the neat trees drawn alongside and the little stick people going about their business in a super modern landscape. But this is real and so unlike the reality of every other town or suburb encountered in Australia so far.
Of course it reflects the whole design of Canberra; that a new city be imagined and brought to fruition from scratch. Canberra did not evolve as a river crossing, a port, a goldfield or a convict settlement, but as a whole new centre of government after Federation took place in 1901. It did take until 1909 to decide where to locate this centre, and then a few more years to select the winning design by Walter Burley Griffin and his talented architect wife, Marion Mahoney Griffin of Chicago, in 1912. The following year, the future capital was named “Canberra”, a variation on the aboriginal name meaning “meeting place”; quite apt in the circumstances. Griffin was immediately appointed Director of Design and given the go-ahead to make a start on his plan.
The general concept of The Plan was that a hierarchical urban structure be established with a descending order of towns, town centres and suburban neighbourhoods. A decentralised development model was adopted with four new towns: Woden-Weston Breek, Belconnen, Tungerabong and Gungahlin. The layout of the new towns, linked by arterial roads and open spaces, contrasted with the sprawling concentric pattern of most other Australian cities.
While the Provisional Parliament buildings were ready for business in 1927 (the Federal government had been carrying out its business in the meantime in Melbourne), progress on the capital city was sluggish and Griffin was given the heave-ho. Then came the depression and the Second World War, so there was not too much more progress until in 1948, post-war European immigrants arrived offering skills in construction. In the late 1950’s the National Capital Development Commission Act was passed and work started again in earnest. Soon public servants were being transferred in by the thousands and the population reached 37,000.
However it was not until 1962 that the first satellite town of Woden was begun and one year later, Lake Burley Griffin, was completed. The Molonglo River flows through these limestone plains, the damming of which has created an artificial decorative lake eleven kilometres long and just over a kilometre at its widest. The average depth is a mere four metres and its flow is regulated by the 18 metre high Scrivener Dam, named after the surveyor, Charles Scrivener. This was all part of the Griffin Plan, which is still on-going even today.
When the capital was started, the plains were more or less treeless, and it fell on the shoulders of one Charles Weston to deal with the landscaping. Between 1913 and 1924, he was responsible for the planting of two million trees and shrubs. By 1945, the number of trees planted in Canberra had risen to twenty million.
In the very early 1970’s when Chris passed through this way, and soon afterwhen my mother was here visiting her older sister who then lived here, the population had reached 130,000. By 1988 the new parliament buildings had been completed and Canberra’s population had reached 273,500. Today the population is over 350,000. The city is laid out in such way to manage the population growth, and it is this that impresses me; that someone one hundred years ago, designing a complete city, could grasp the fact that the population would reach such a size in that time, will continue to multiply over the next century and will all neatly fit within the concepts laid out all those years ago. Of course the mere fact that this surprises me is evidence that I was never trained in architecture or town planning, but undertook a career in the blinkered world of bookkeeping.
Our education today, the first full day here in Canberra was carefully planned. Our first stop was the top of Mount Ainslie where there is an excellent lookout from where one can look directly down along Anzac Parade, across the lake and on up Commonwealth Parade to the Parliament, both the old and the new. The views beyond and all around are also there for the taking but it is the geometric triangles that catch one’s imagination. In the distance, the mountains create the sides of the wide geographical basin. There are excellent interpretative panels all about and it is a good start to one’s exploration of this amazing city.
From here we descended to the National Capital Exhibition where one can learn all about the birth of Canberra, the national capital, through interactive displays, photos, films, photos and a host of stories. The centre is set above the lake, across from Parliament. Once upon a time, it was the site for the observation platform from where the progress of the lake could be observed. The friendly youthful staff share their task with elderly volunteers, and this afternoon, Ian, well into his seventies, still working in his trade on other days of the week, supplemented the official information with a heap of other interesting titbits and tips. He was keen to offer endless advice; we were keen to head back to camp. We hit the streets at about 4 pm and were delighted to find the traffic was no worse than it had been at any other time of the day. Canberra is a dream to drive around in.
No comments:
Post a Comment