When the Australian colonies federated into a single country in 1901, they faced a delicate political question: which city would be the capital? Sydney was the largest and oldest. Melbourne was the wealthiest and most cosmopolitan. Each city resented the prospect of the other getting the prize. The compromise written into the federal constitution stipulated that the capital must be in New South Wales but at least 100 miles from Sydney, and that Melbourne would serve as the temporary seat of government until the new capital could be built. A federal commission spent over a decade scouting sites, and in 1908 settled on a sheep-grazing valley about 280 kilometres southwest of Sydney and 660 kilometres northeast of Melbourne. The site had three things going for it: it was far enough from Sydney to satisfy the law, it was on the route of the existing Sydney-Melbourne railway, and the climate was mild enough that the federal politicians who would eventually have to move there would not complain too bitterly. The city that was to be built on the site did not yet have a name. It did not yet have a plan. It did not yet have any buildings. It barely had any people. Out of these blank conditions emerged Canberra.
The Design Competition
In 1911 the Australian federal government held an international competition for the design of the new capital. 137 entries were submitted. The winner, announced in 1912, was a Chicago-based architect-and-landscape-architect couple named Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin. Walter had worked in the studio of Frank Lloyd Wright; Marion was an accomplished architectural illustrator and one of the first licensed female architects in the United States. Their design, drawn in watercolour and ink on enormous sheets of presentation board, organised the new city around a series of formal axes radiating from a central artificial lake. The Parliamentary Triangle — a triangle formed by three major roads, with the legislature at its apex — would anchor the south side of the lake. Civic and residential districts would surround it in a layout that combined Beaux-Arts formality with the curving, contour-respecting suburban patterns that Wright and the broader Prairie School were experimenting with at the time.
The Griffins moved to Australia to oversee construction in 1913. They were frustrated almost immediately. The federal bureaucracy that controlled the project resisted their design at every level, modified it without consulting them, and eventually pushed Walter Griffin out of his supervising role in 1920. By the time the Griffins left Australia in 1937, much of their original plan had been compromised, and Walter died in India shortly afterwards while supervising another project. Marion outlived her husband by more than two decades and returned to Chicago, where she wrote a long unpublished memoir titled "The Magic of America" that included substantial sections on the Australian experience and what she considered the betrayal of their original vision.
The Lake at the Center
The single most important element of the Griffin plan was the artificial lake at the centre of the city, formed by damming the Molonglo River. The lake was meant to provide a formal water axis through the city and a focal point for the surrounding civic and residential districts. The dam was not actually built until 1963 — five decades after the competition — and the lake (Lake Burley Griffin, named after Walter) finally filled in 1964. By that time the city around it had grown haphazardly, with several decades of unplanned and partial implementation of various reduced versions of the original design. The completed lake nonetheless became the defining feature of the city, with the Parliamentary Triangle on the south shore, the original commercial centre of Civic on the north shore, and a series of public buildings (the National Library, the High Court, the National Gallery, the Australian War Memorial) arranged around its perimeter.
Why Canberra Is the Way It Is
Canberra has a reputation, among Australians who do not live there, for being unusually quiet, formally laid-out, and lacking the bustle of older Australian cities. This reputation is partly fair. The city has very low density — most of it consists of suburbs of detached single-family houses on quarter-acre blocks, separated by extensive parks and bushland — and the population (about 470,000 as of 2025) is small relative to the city's footprint. The original Griffin plan called for the city to be polycentric, with multiple separated commercial centres rather than a single dominant downtown, and that decentralisation has been preserved as the city has grown. Driving from one residential district to another typically requires passing through several kilometres of parkland or sparse outer-suburban roads. Public transport exists (a single light rail line opened in 2019, plus bus routes) but the city is overwhelmingly car-dependent.
The Federal Workforce
Canberra's economy is dominated by the federal public service. Around 40 percent of the city's workforce is employed directly by the Australian government, either in the federal departments and agencies headquartered in the city or in the Australian Defence Force's national headquarters. This concentration produces some unusual demographic patterns. The city has the highest median household income in Australia, the highest proportion of university graduates, the highest proportion of residents with postgraduate degrees, and the lowest unemployment rate. It also has the highest proportion of residents who work directly for the government and the lowest exposure to private-sector economic cycles. When the federal government changes hands in elections, large numbers of ministerial staffers and senior officials cycle in and out of the city, while the permanent civil service remains largely stable.
The Parliamentary Triangle
The most important civic district of the city is the Parliamentary Triangle, the formal area on the south shore of Lake Burley Griffin defined by three major roads — Commonwealth Avenue, Kings Avenue, and the State Circle that loops around Capital Hill. At the apex of the triangle stands the new Parliament House, opened in 1988 to mark the 200th anniversary of European settlement of Australia. The building is built into Capital Hill rather than on top of it, with the natural topography preserved as a grass roof over the legislative chambers. It is one of the most architecturally ambitious legislative buildings constructed anywhere in the world in the second half of the twentieth century, and it has more square footage than any other parliament building. The older Provisional Parliament House, opened in 1927 as a temporary structure expected to be replaced within fifty years, sits below the new building and now serves as the Museum of Australian Democracy.
The Embassies
Around the Parliamentary Triangle and in the adjacent suburbs of Yarralumla and Forrest, the city contains the embassies and high commissions of nearly every country with which Australia has diplomatic relations. The embassy district is one of Canberra's few genuinely cosmopolitan features. Many of the embassies have been built in styles meant to evoke their home countries: the Indonesian embassy is in a traditional Javanese style, the Thai embassy in a Thai temple style, the Chinese embassy in a Chinese imperial-classical style, the Papua New Guinea embassy in a traditional Highlands haus tambaran style with a tall pointed roof. Embassy tours during the city's annual Multicultural Festival are a longstanding local tradition.
The Bush Capital
One of the distinctive features of Canberra is the proximity of relatively undisturbed Australian bushland to the city's residential districts. The city was deliberately laid out around the existing landscape rather than flattening it, and substantial areas of native eucalypt forest, grasslands, and ridgelines remain within the urban boundary. Kangaroos are routinely seen grazing on the verges of residential streets. Cockatoos and rosellas are common urban birds. The Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve, 40 minutes' drive from the city centre, contains substantial wildlife including platypus and various marsupials. The 2003 Canberra bushfires — which destroyed nearly 500 homes in the western suburbs and killed four people — were a reminder that the bush capital comes with bush risks, and the city has progressively invested in better fire planning and management since.
What Canberra Has Become
The current Canberra is a curious thing: an entirely planned city of nearly half a million people, in a country whose other major cities all grew organically from colonial origins; a federal capital where most of the population works directly for the government; a "bush capital" with kangaroos in the suburbs; a city designed by Americans in 1911 whose central lake did not fill until 1964; a place that other Australians enjoy mocking but rarely move away from once they live there. Whether the Griffin vision was successfully implemented or quietly betrayed is something serious people still debate. What is clear is that Canberra has become recognisable as itself — a city that nobody could mistake for Sydney or Melbourne or any of the older capitals it was created to compromise between. The compromise produced something none of the original parties to the federation could have predicted.