Canberra as you’ve never seen it: the painters who formed a capital
After the wrangling leading up to Federation was over, the next question was where to put the national capital. Here is the story of how art helped create the Canberra we know today
After the wrangling leading up to Federation was over, the next question was where to put the national capital. Australia was already dominated by the two great rival cities of Sydney and Melbourne, and neither could tolerate the idea of the other serving as the centre of national political life. It was agreed therefore that a new capital city would be built in a neutral territory, the main stipulation being the minimum distance of 100 miles from either of the main state capitals.
By 1909, the government settled on the site of Canberra. But the outcome could have been very different. In 1904, a bill was tabled in parliament to establish the capital at Dalgety. Today, few people have even heard of this town, which is situated very close to the border with Victoria. One the most important opponents of Dalgety and supporters of Canberra was my forebear John Gale, to whom a bronze statue was erected in Queanbeyan 20 years ago as the Father of Canberra.
Gale was born in 1831 in Cornwall and came to Australia in 1853 as a very young Methodist preacher. It was as he rode across the limestone plain on Christmas Day 1855, he later recalled in Canberra: history and legends (1927, p.4) that he first thought of this as the site of a great city. He encouraged his brother Peter to emigrate too, bringing out a printing press, and in 1860 they started the first newspaper in Queanbeyan, which became The Queanbeyan Age. Later he served briefly as a member of the NSW Legislative Assembly.
Another of his brothers, my great great grandfather and namesake Christopher Parrah Gale, also migrated to Australia in 1855 and became a pioneer of the lower Clarence River; the journal of his adventurous voyage out was later published and parts are available online at the National Library.
The choice of Dalgety was opposed by the NSW parliament, but in 1907 Sir John Forrest submitted a detailed report supporting Dalgety and rejecting Canberra.
John Gale gave a comprehensive rebuttal of Forrest’s argument in a speech which was then printed as The National Capital. Dalgety or Canberra: Which? (1907). This pamphlet, widely circulated at the time and also available to read online at the National Library, was so effective that it apparently even convinced Sir John Forrest to change his mind in the final vote.
Once the matter of the site had been finally decided, the process of building and planning the city, part of the subject of this exhibition, could begin. It perhaps says something about the central place of landscape painting in Australian art that the government sought to develop a national awareness of the project by announcing, in 1912, a prize for paintings of the place where the new city would arise.
The brief called for pictures that were “panoramic with midday effects”, perhaps because the preference was for objectivity rather than moodiness and atmosphere, but midday light conditions, which flatten everything and reduce shadows to a minimum, make it harder to achieve a satisfactory painting. Streeton, for example, both in his early Golden Summer, Eaglemont (1889) and his later Land of the Golden Fleece (1926), takes advantage of shadows cast by hills in the early morning to anchor the composition.
In the end 10 large paintings were shown in an exhibition that toured around the state capitals; and two of these hang side-by-side in the first room of the gallery: Theodore Brooke Hansen’s
Landscape Canberra (1913) and A.E. Macdonald, Early Canberra (1913).
For want of shadow, Macdonald relies on the darker tone of a patch of bare ground in the lower left of his picture as well as the darker hills in the background and a particular thematic and tonal focus on the right, with the little church of Saint John’s (built 1841-45), surrounded by green trees. Here and there a few houses can be seen, and a flock of sheep.
Hansen takes a view from a much higher vantage point, and a fringe of hillside trees forms a dark foreground to contrast with the sunlit fields beyond. The existing settlement is barely visible so that the whole view appears as a vast emptiness, even though Gale (Canberra, p.3) makes a point of noting a significant Aboriginal population. The effect of emptiness and potential is even more vividly conveyed in the printed Cycloramic view of Canberra capital site (1911), based on a watercolour by Charles Coulter and circulated to architects when the international design competition for the new capital was announced in 1911.
The commission was awarded to Walter Burley Griffin – out of 137 submissions – in May 1912 but, as we saw late last year in discussing the exhibition devoted to Marion Mahony Griffin at the Museum of Sydney, there were difficulties from the beginning in realising Griffin’s visionary design for a modern ideal city in the face of sceptical and obstructive bureaucrats and, after several changes of government, inquiries and attempts at compromise, Griffin resigned from the project in 1920.
Development was also held up by the shortage of funds and other priorities during the two World Wars and the intervening Depression. A first burst of building, in the 1920s, resulted in the completion, by 1927, of the temporary Parliament House, some government offices and residences, and the Sydney and Melbourne buildings in Civic. The Great Depression came two years later.
From 1921 to 1952, it seems that the project was largely kept on track by the efforts of Charles Studdy Daley, who was the head of a succession of authorities charged with overseeing the building of the capital. Apparently he did not much like Griffin personally, but did his best to preserve his vision of the shape of the new city, even if the buildings that eventually ended up occupying central points in the plan were not always those that Griffin had envisaged.
The exhibition includes Daley’s handsome desk, designed in 1927 at the same time as Parliament House, and his desk chair. In front of his desk and nearby is a collection of paintings, etchings and photographs of Canberra from the years that he was in charge, as though evoking the views onto which he looked out during these years. Many of them, including three little pictures by Elioth Gruner, from the late 20s and early 30s, still represent Canberra as rural, with barely a hint of a city.
The title of Douglas Dundas’ Canberra Cow Pastures (1941) speaks for itself; next to it is a fine view of Parliament House by his wife Dorothy Thornhill (1940-42) which is almost more striking in the way the new white building seems isolated amid fields and wild trees. There is an attractive view of St John’s Church by Ethel Carrick Fox (c. 1944), but that is of a building that was already a century old; at last in another picture by her from the same year, Colonnades of Canberra’s Civic Centre, we glimpse something of the fabric of the new city.
In the later 1950s, under Sir Robert Menzies’ energetic leadership, the building of Canberra was largely completed. The new National Capital Development Commission was formed to oversee development, and in 1960 Menzies personally insisted that the lake intended by Griffin be finally constructed, even if it does not quite match his original design; the lake was inaugurated by him in October 1964, in a speech in which he recalled the long struggle to overcome stubborn opposition to the project, and his own belief that “you can’t have a great city unless you have water in it”.
Today it is impossible to imagine Canberra without its central lake. Charles Scrivener, the surveyor who had defined the site in 1909, imagined a city lying “in an amphitheatre of hills”; this sense of a surrounding landscape is important when there is no view to look out onto, but the outward focus of the hills is balanced by the inward focus of the water. The water provides a sense of space and grandeur, but also contemplative stillness; and it is a living natural environment; interesting, Menzies observed that he didn’t mind if the lake walls crumbled here and there, allowing rushes to grow as habitats for waterbirds.
Another more immediate project that the new Commission undertook was to create Civic Square, which is especially relevant to CMAG since the institution exists on one side of that space. At the time it was the height of modernist design but one has to admit that it looks rather tired now. Like much architecture of the time it has not aged well because it was never good in the first place: the materials are sterile, the forms banal and the whole effect lacks both grandeur and humanity.
The centrepiece of the new square was a public sculpture commissioned from Tom Bass, but as the exhibition label points out, “the design committee struggled to give the artist a clear brief for his work”. There was already a crisis of public sculpture, which is to say a crisis of what a monument should say, do or be. This was not to be a monument to a particular man or woman, and abstract ideological symbols had become almost impossible to employ after their abuse by totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.
In the end Bass came up with a rather bland modernist figure with uplifted hands and wings, and gave her an even blander name: Ethos, which was perhaps meant to have associations with the word ethics but which really refers to little more than a character formed by repeated habitual behaviour. The statue itself can be seen outside, but the exhibition includes a separate and later casting of the head. Nearby is a photograph of the square by night in which Max Dupain has used the photographer’s magic to make the space seem atmospheric.
The exhibition continues with recollections of more recent events like the Canberra bushfires of 2003 and a variety of works from the last decades of the 20th century; what they tell us about Canberra, however, is fairly slight compared to the works already discussed, and we are again reminded how much of the art of that period retreated into stylistic mannerisms and formulas which have only become more obviously vacuous with the passage of time and the ebbing of fashions and reputations. Hansen and Macdonald are not giants of Australian painting, but there is more in their workmanlike landscapes than in the largely mediocre display that fills this last room because they are not introverted, ideological, or trying to be clever and second-guess artistic trends. In their self-effacing and impersonal way, they allowed their contemporaries to ponder the future, and now invite us to reflect on the past, of the site of Australia’s national capital.
Seeing Canberra
Canberra Museum and Art Gallery to July 24