Text: Christopher Vernon (The University of Western Australia)
Images: Selected illustrations by Nikolinka Zheleva

The centenary of Walter and Marion Griffin’s arrival down under makes it timely to (re)consider erecting a memorial to the city’s authors at the national capital, Australia’s greatest achievement in landscape architecture.

A century ago this year, Walter and Marion Griffin voyaged to Australia to begin orchestrating the realisation of their prize-winning design for Canberra. The centenary of the Griffins’ arrival down under makes it timely to (re)consider erecting a memorial to the city’s authors at the national capital, Australia’s greatest achievement in landscape architecture. This proposition is not a new one; it actually has a lengthy history.

The first calls for a memorial to Walter Burley Griffin were made upon learning of his accidental death in India on 11 February 1937 (devastated, Marion would return to Chicago the next year). When the tragic news reached Australia days later, proposals for a monument of some sort to Griffin pervaded his obituaries. On 16 February, for instance, Canberra Times (CT) reported that ‘action will probably be taken to name some prominent part of Canberra after its designer’. Some even proposed that a statue of him be erected at the capital. However, as many believed fledgling Canberra itself to be Griffin’s monument, moves for a statue or memorial nomenclature soon petered out.

Months later, though, he was in fact commemorated with a memorial of sorts, albeit only a two-dimensional one. In May, Alice Henry, a Melbourne journalist and one of the Griffins’ long-standing Australian friends, gifted a photographic studio portrait of Walter to the National Library of Australia (NLA). Touchingly, Walter himself had given the photograph to Henry some two decades earlier. The portrait was now ‘hung in the basement at Parliament House alongside the original plan of Canberra submitted by him at the time of the competition’....Continue Reading

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