King O'Malley Takes Charge -

"What Competition?"

King O'Malley - overseer of the design competition - was at first delighted with the result of his competition, and he was full of praise for the plan of the unknown American. 'It is a wonderful design', he said. 'What we wanted was the best the world could give us and we got it'. But criticism of Griffin's design came from many directions. John Sulman said that the winning scheme was 'the only one in which the designer possessed an artistic grip of town planning', but he thought 'a much better result' would have been obtained if 'well-known town planners' had been able to participate. 'Everybody admits that it is a pretty scheme', said a Melbourne surveyor, but 'every competent critic seems to find some defect in it'. Meetings in Melbourne condemned the 'proposed needless extravagant expenditure on a bush capital at Yass-Canberra', and a lengthily review of the Griffin plan in the Argus summed up the general feeling that the design was altogether impractical and too costly:

"It may be accepted as a general axiom in town planning that one should plan so as to avoid altering the face of nature to much before one begins to build...what has the successful candidate done?...he has been at immense pains to make his lakes circular...and though it looks very pretty and symmetrical upon the plan to have circular lakes, yet it would be impossible to tell if the lakes were actually circular without observation from a balloon...the federal government cannot afford to throw money away...the plan is that of a landscape artist rather than an engineer... it looks as though the author of this plan...had been carefully reading books upon town planning without having much more theoretical knowledge to go upon."

O'Malley could not ignore the growing criticism of Griffin's design, even though most of it was neither fair nor well-informed. When he was asked if the government intended to build from Griffin's plan, O'Malley referred to the competition conditions which gave the government the right to use premeiated schemes as it saw fit. 'We will not be actually restricted to the winning design', O'Malley said. 'We may use all three designs if necessary to produce the working design...a park might be taken from one, a boulevard from another and a public square from another'. The Victorian institute of architects was horrified. 'The Minister', it said, 'is just about equal to destroying the ideas of the authors by incorporating them into some hotch-potch conglomerate scheme of his own'.

The Departmental Board Plan was most probably the work of Scrivener, seen here (below, in the white coat) with the other members of the board.

On 27 June 1912, O'Malley referred the three premiated designs, together with the design placed first by Coane, which the government bought for 400 pounds, to a Depart-mental Board for its advice. The chairman of the board was David Miller, and the other members were Owen and Scrivener; G.J. Oakeshott, the Commonwealth Director of Works for New South Wales; T. Hall, the Victorian Director of Works; and J.S. Murdoch, Senior Architect in the Department of Home Affairs. On 25 November, the board reported to O'Malley that it was unable to recommend any of the four designs, and that it advised the adoption instead of a plan prepared by the Board, which incorporated what it considered to be the better features of the other proposals.

The Departmental Board plan, 'concocted largely on the combination salad principle', was a ghastly thing, bearing scant resemblance to Griffin's winning plan. Patrick Abercombie, a leading British town planner at the time, said it was obviously the work of people 'utterly untrained in the elements of architectural composition', and that it reminded of a 'third-rate Luna Park'. O'Malley said later that he would have preferred to stay with the Griffin design, but that he had been dissuaded by the Departmental Board who had told him of the 'prohibitive cost of carrying Mr Griffin's design into effect'. On 26 November 1913, O'Malley approved the plan prepared by the Board, and this was confirmed by the Fisher government in January. O'Malley was bitterly attacked for abandoning the Griffin plan - 'The Minister', wrote the editor of the Sydney journal Building, 'is not an Australian, and is not inspired by any patriotic fervour but the cheap-jack Yankee impulses of a mercenary mind'.

O'Malley (below) laid the third stone of the Commencement Column, using an engraved golden trowel.

A copy of the Departmental Board plan was sent to Griffin in Chicago. Griffin replied in January 1913, suggesting that he should meet with the Board on site to work out 'the unsolved plan problems', but Miller, now living in Canberra and firmly in control of the capital project, advised his Minister that officers of his Department 'are thoroughly competent to carry out the scheme and...it would be most unwise to interfere with them'. In due course, Griffin was brought to Australia to oversee construction of his design, but he was subject to constant harassment from the Department and he left Canberra at the end of 1920. It would be another thirty years before he would be hailed as the creator of one of the world's greatest city plans, but on 20 February 1913, when King O'Malley drove the first peg on a survey line through the city, and on 12 March 1913, when construction of the city was formally commenced. a disappointed Walter Griffin was 8,000 miles away in Chicago, and the plan on which the capital was based was not his, but that of the Departmental Board.

Although Canberra was born through competition and controversy, it remains today one of the great town planning accomplishments of modern time. This is due largely in part to the successful landscape transformation.

End of the road, back to the HOMEPAGE.