Senator Lundy gave a speech on Tuesday in Parliament on the National Capital and Centenary History. Please find the speech below.
Just down the hill from the Parliament, not more than a ten-minute walk from here, the Maps Section of the National Library of Australia is currently playing host to a superb exhibition on the role that maps played in the compelling story of Canberra. I recommend it to all my colleagues in the chamber. Curated by a former Australian High Commissioner to Canada (turned passionate cartographer), Greg Wood, the exhibition is delightfully entitled: ‘Far-Sited: the Maps That Made Canberra’.
If you’re feeling particularly energetic, take a further stroll across Commonwealth Bridge, and then along the R G Menzies Walk to the National Capital Exhibition, where a fine– and complementary– display hosted by the National Capital Authority traces the key role played by surveyor Charles Scrivener in the story. I’m sure colleagues are aware that one of Scrivener’s original huts can be seen and enjoyed any lunchtime, for it’s only a hundred metres or so—a stone’ throw—to the west of the Senate Entrance, in the aptly named ‘Scrivener Park’.
The fact is we are surrounded by history in this city, and the weight and significance of the Centenary birthday years, from 2008 to a climax in March 2013, has all of Canberra very excited, and many Canberrans already actively involved in the commemoration build-up.
To date, activity has been generated largely by Chief Minister Jon Stanhope and the ACT Government team, through an emerging program that had its germination in 2006 with the welcome announcement of Sir William Deane as Patron of the Centenary– and led to a set of announcements and thoughtful community events, since then, which have created a growing, irresistible momentum.
In December last year, the Commonwealth and ACT Governments signed an agreement to collaborate on the Centenaryon the exact date when, 100 years earlier, on the 14 December 1908, the Seat of Government (Yass-Canberra) Act 1908 received the Royal Assent. This Act, as I discussed in some detail in a Senate speech late last year, brought to an end the so-called ‘Battle of the Sites’, when numerous, aspiring New South Wales towns, between 1902 and 1908, vied to be what one well-known writer of the period termed the ‘Treasure House of a Nation’s Heart’. ‘Yass-Canberra’, as Gen X-ers and Y-ers might say these days, ‘got the gig’.
But the Canberra story did not go into hiatus mode at that point, until 1913. Far from it. In many ways the story, 1909 to 1912, got more and more interesting– and it certainly got more complex.
1909 was a fascinating Centenary year, and it too had a late climax.
Charles Scrivener, always a favourite of the Commonwealth politicians, both Labor and conservative, had early in the year embarked on a preliminary survey of the main ‘Yass-Canberra’ site options, examining Mahkoolma, Yass, Gundaroo, Hall, Lake George and ………. the option called ‘Canberra’. It is worth noting that Scrivener always favoured distant Dalgety as his capital but, given the job of canvassing the ‘Canberra valley’, with typical professionalism he went about his business and eventually, and quite correctly, chose the city precinct we know today.
This area was the one that Scrivener felt went closest to fulfilling the instructions that he had been given by the Labor Government Minister for Home Affairs of the day, Hugh Mahon.
Mahon’s brief is a memorable one and, like so much of the thinking of a cluster of high-minded Federation fathers a century ago, worth putting into the Hansard record in 2009. He tasked Scrivener with giving the new Commonwealth of Australia ‘a beautiful city, occupying a commanding position, with extensive views, and embracing distinctive features which will lend themselves to the evolution of a design worthy of the object, not only for the present but for all time … ‘
It was a noble and visionary brief, and Scrivener (helped greatly by the earlier work of a number of NSW Government surveyors including Arthur Lloyd and Leslie Wade, and the architect Walter Liberty Vernon), got it exactly right. ‘Canberra’, he wrote in his report, ‘would be visible on approach for many miles … The capital would lie in an amphitheatre of hills …’
Those Senators familiar with extraordinary plan of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin to come in 1911-12 might well recognise the continuity of language and intent of those Australians who had national capital roles of significance before the Griffins—and who, in subtle ways, influenced the Griffins as they produced their design of Canberra in the last months of 1911, in distant Chicago, without ever having set foot in Australia.
Indeed, at the conclusion of the many months in 1909 of Scrivener’s survey and its acceptance by government, the Sydney Morning Herald reporter on 27 November 1909– one hundred years ago almost to the day– caught the lofty mood of the moment in these words: ‘ … when we begin to build, even though unpretentiously, we should build to a plan nobly conceived and worthy of the setting provided by nature. Even though our capital be small, a unique opportunity offers for making it one of the most beautiful cities in the world’.
Considering that some of the most internationally distinguished architectural and planning scholars have in the last couple of decades acknowledged Canberra as the world’s most elegant ‘capital city in the landscape’, the Herald reporter’s words back then have genuine prescience.
Yet the year 1909 was not just the Scrivener chapter of the larger Canberra narrative. It had its moments of real political controversy too, not least when Queensland Senator Thomas Givens, another who favoured Dalgety, in October moved a motion in the Senate to re-examine the site issue. The motion was defeated, but only just, and the controversy highlighted yet another period of vigorous and intensely contested national capital debate– almost a year after the Seat of Government Act had seemed to settle the issue. Biases, tirades, statistics and sheer exasperation continued to flood across the floors of the two federal chambers. The site debate would not subside.
Labor politicians of the period, both in government and in opposition, played crucial catalyst roles in the pursuit of a capital at this time. Chris Watson, the leader of the world’s first national labour government, was conspicuous throughout these years. He was arguably the parliamentary key to Canberra getting the nod.
For it was Watson who, in April 1908, less than 12 months before Scrivener produced his survey, stated the Canberra case unequivocally, and probably decisively, when he said: ‘ … I was certainly impressed at Canberra by the picturesque appearance, which ought to commend the site to all who desire the beautiful. In the vicinity there are mountain gorges, which afford every diversity of scenery, and I have been informed by trout fishers that there are most interesting places in the heart of the Murrumbidgee Mountains, full of beauty … I do not say that picturesqueness alone should decide the question; but, other things being equal, I think the beautiful ought to turn the scale … ‘
Scrivener’s second report in May 1909 was a beauty and, despite Queenslander Givens’ pot-stirring a few months later, the process moved inexorably on to the Seat of Government Surrender Bill going through both houses of the NSW parliament on 7 December 1909 and, six days later, the Governor-General, Lord Dudley, putting his signature to the Seat of Government Acceptance Act 1909, on 13 December. Thus, an ‘area of about 900 square miles’ was finally given to the Commonwealth.
The precise borders were still not certain, but that’s a story for Centenary year 2010.
In the coming weeks the ACT Government will launch a series of five booklets that fill the main scholarly gaps in the Canberra story. This is great news for the rapidly expanding group of students of the national capital’s rich and engaging history.
On top of that, we now know that the Centenary will have Robyn Archer as its Creative Director, all the way through to the climactic year of 2013. The appointment of one of this country’s most eminent artists is a wonderful coup for the ACT Government. As a singer, writer, artistic director and irrepressible arts advocate, Robyn Archer has carved out a national and international reputation. Already she has put her unique stamp on the Centenary program, and it can only be hoped that her energy and commitment will result in a dramatic increase in the number of collaborative activities between the ACT and Australian Governments in 2010 and beyond.
Canberra’s Centenary is truly an Australian Centenary. How memorable it is, its set of lasting legacies into the 21st century, will depend on how much ownership Australians have of the celebration. The historical and cultural groundwork is being carefully laid in the build-up years. It remains for the nation, and the nation’s politicians, to embrace its many possibilities.
