Eureka to the Diggers

by Thomas Keneally

  Deakin was realistic in his acceptance of what it was possible to achieve in most of these bush sites. ‘The seat of government would certainly not be more than a mere township for many years . . . Without descending to the modesty of the wattle and the daub, anything that will shelter the honourable members from the inclemency of the weather should be good enough for us.’ This was wise advice given that Bombala had been the most recent recommendation of the Commonwealth Commissioners, appointed to report independently of the politicians’ reconnaissance. And if not Bombala, they had said, then Orange or Tumut.

  At last, a non-preferential ballot took place in the House of Representatives at eleven o’clock in the evening on 8 October 1902. In this first ballot one site was to be marked by each member and Bombala got sixteen votes and Lyndhurst (the whistle-stop village almost halfway between Bathurst and Cowra) and Tumut fourteen each. On the final, fourth ballot, Tumut beat Lyndhurst by thirty-six votes to twenty-five. In Tumut, the town crier went through the streets shouting the wonderful news and Madigan’s Oriental Hotel kept an open bar.

  George Reid and many Sydney members of the House were appalled that the capital would end up so much closer to Melbourne than to Sydney. The tenor of the debate over the capital is shown by the fact that when the bill resulting from the ballot was sent to the Senate, the New South Wales senators described the selection of a site a dog show, one small town after another being promoted by this or that senator and Tumut being the final result. One of the members called his opponents ‘political dingos’, and a Victorian senator said the New South Wales speeches against Victorian interests were no better than ‘the outpourings of a sewer’. The Senate sent the bill back to the House of Representatives for re-consideration of the location of the envisaged capital and, believing this would be the pattern time after time, Prime Minister Deakin dropped the matter.

  In 1903 Lyne prepared a seat of government bill which involved proposing an act with the name of the chosen site as a blank, but members said they ‘did not feel inclined to stand up and discuss a blank’. He suggested that a ballot be held amongst members of both Houses, and a preferential voting system be used to select the capital. This was arch cunning on the part of a man who more than any other politician wanted the capital in his own seat. Preferential voting meant that those who wanted Albury or Tumut (the majority, he believed) would put Bombala last, and vice versa. George Reid, Free Trade prime minister now and destined to last in office only eleven months, opposed the proposal and it went down.

  For characteristically eccentric reasons, there was a phase in which King O’Malley wanted Bombala. ‘The history of the world shows that cold climates produce the greatest geniuses . . . How big is the state of Maine? That state is not as big as Bombala, and yet it gave birth to Longfellow.’ Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece thus counted for nothing with O’Malley. Indeed, he thought that if you put the greatest men into places such as Tumut or Albury instead of Bombala, in three generations their descendants would be degenerate. ‘I found them [that is, similar types] in San Domingo on a Sabbath morning going to a cock fight with a rooster under each arm and a sombrero on their heads.’

  Chris Watson was the next to try to finalise the issue. In 1904, as prime minister, he introduced a new bill which called for the federal territory to be within a square thirty miles (48 kilometres) in length and breadth. As a result of a new parliamentary ballot Bombala was now chosen, replacing Tumut, but not definitively. In the bill, now moved successfully through both Houses, the nine hundred square mile (approximately 1500 square kilometre) capital territory was confirmed, although still no one knew where it would be. During the debate Tumut had been considered too low-lying, so Lyne scoured his electorate and came up with a salubrious mountain not far from what he called the ‘world famous Tumba-rumba Creek’. The name of the place was Tooma.

  In despair and self-interest, others argued that Sydney and Melbourne should host alternate sessions of federal Parliament. On 9 August 1904, there was yet another House of Representatives ballot and Tumut mourned yet again as the Dalgety site near Bombala was voted in. Even as this ballot took place, the New South Wales principal engineer, L.A.B. Wade, had been surveying the region between Yass, Goulburn and Queanbeyan and found it satisfactory, and the federal leaders showed no interest in rushing their parliament up to the wild environs of Dalgety.

  The next potentially significant stage occurred some years later when, in early 1907, John Forrest, acting prime minister while Deakin was away attending a Commonwealth conference in London, visited the pastoral area Wade had nominated, a region which had been named Canberra or Canberry since it was settled. Forrest knew it had its advocates but declared it possessed ‘Nothing of particular importance in either scenery or great natural features . . . There are no rising knolls for public edifices’. The summer of 1907–08 dried up most of the water in every site other than the Canberra region, however, and so Canberra passed an important test.

  So by March 1908 Deakin, in his second prime ministership, wrote to Wade for copies of all reports on Canberra and its region. He delayed the bill until April, and then muddied the waters by saying, ‘The supremacy of Dalgety is un-challengeable.’ The urgency which had fuelled him towards Federation did not possess him when it came to choosing the national capital. He was, after all, a Victorian, and how convenient it was for him and the other Melburnite members to catch a tram to the federal Parliament in Spring Street instead of finding their way to a paddock in Monaro. The argument rolled on, with the New South Welshman Reid still pushing his barrow for Lyndhurst in his electorate, Lyne pushing Tooma near Tumut, and others urging consideration of an array of places in the mid-west of New South Wales as well as in its north and south.

  Sir John Forrest, however, urged his fellow members on ‘because Federation will never be complete’, he said, until the choice was made. In fact, a bill called generally the Dalgety Bill, reflecting Deakin’s preference, was before Parliament, and when the House resumed at the end of September 1908 the debate began again. There seemed to be anxiety amongst members about the choice of Dalgety, its inaccessibility and its severe winters, and a growing enthusiasm for Canberra could be detected. ‘If we go to Dalgety,’ said William Morris Hughes, ‘the climate will kill half the older men in parliament.’

  On the evening of 1 October 1908, the House of Representatives agreed to have a new ballot. Austin Chapman, the member who had most pushed the Dalgety option, had suffered a stroke and gone to Maryborough to recover—at which some in the House said it was strange he did not go to Dalgety if the place was as healthy as he had so frequently argued. By the seventh round of the ballot Canberra was emerging as the choice. On the next ballot Canberra gained further support from those whose favoured locations had been eliminated, particularly from George Reid’s Lyndhurst and Lyne’s beloved Tooma. On the ninth and last ballot ‘Yass-Canberra’ beat Dalgety by thirty-nine votes to thirty-three.

  In the Senate, which needed to confirm the decision, Canberra won against Dalgety by nineteen votes to seventeen. So when Andrew Fisher became Labor prime minister in November 1908, he took the Seat of Government (Yass-Canberra) Bill to its second reading and got it through both Houses. The argument about seats, municipalities and pastures was over.

  Town planning was a barely established genre in 1910 when the first international conference in London was attended by an Australian architect, John Sulman, who gave a paper on the desirability of the radial ring system of roads instead of the traditional checkerboard. To Sulman, the architectural inheritance of Australia was pitiful and his spirit expanded to the idea of a new city to be built from the pastoral soil up. Some of his ideas would ultimately be incorporated in the new capital, and indeed he would design the famous Canberra Civic buildings.

  Meanwhile, between November 1908 and April 1910, Australia had three prime ministerships—Fisher, Deakin for a third time by creating a Fusion Party out of t
he three non-Labor groupings, and then Fisher for a second time by election, the first prime minister to have a majority in both Houses. Fisher had not had time to do much in his first term and now had much on his mind, not least the creating of an Australian navy, of a people’s bank named the Commonwealth, of price-fixing legislation. King O’Malley, as Minister for Home Affairs, was left to pursue the capital issue. But having begun as a great supporter of a bush capital, he had by now come to doubt the sanity of any member who would want to leave Melbourne, where the rents were low, the people prosperous and healthy, ‘and where we have libraries, great newspapers and the best of society’. His being appointed Minister for Home Affairs nonetheless gradually revived his federal capital fervour and he decided that Australia must build the finest capital city in the world. The Federal Territory as marked out on the Canberra plains by a new act had only two small villages, Thawa and Hall, and its population was less than two thousand. The Aboriginal populace had been long banished from the pasturelands along the Molonglo, and the last full-blood was claimed to have died in 1897.

  But this was now, in O’Malley’s mind, the consecrated site. Early in 1911, when Fisher’s government announced the competition for the design of the city, he claimed for himself the right to make the final choice of three designs put forward to him by the selection board. O’Malley, like Billy Hughes, was a believer in the idea that Australia had a huge population growth ahead of it, and the conditions of the prize were that the city designs should be for an initial population of 25 000. By the closing date at the end of January 1912, seventy-two entries had arrived in Melbourne in large crates, and a display of the entries was organised at Government House.

  The highest-placed of the Australian entrants was a design by three Sydney architects, W. Scott Griffiths, Robert Coulter and Charles Caswell. Design twenty-nine came from an architect in Illinois, Walter Burley Griffin. It and a design by Eliel Saarinen of Finland, and another by Professor Alfred Agache of Paris, were the finalists. Agache would receive a commission that year to re-design Dunkirk and would plan extensions of Paris suburbs. He saw the Molonglo as a potential mini-Paris and his was the only design to include an airport. Saarinen’s Canberra was highly formal and classical, with major water features. It demanded cutting the hills and filling lower ground. Of these designs, that of the thirty-five-year-old Walter Burley Griffin was selected by O’Malley, as it had been by two of the three man board. Griffin’s technique involved simple, well-balanced designs, such as that of his proposed federal Parliament. All official buildings were to share the same scale and principles of size so that, looked at from any direction, they ‘worked together into one simple pattern’. There was to be a lack of great towers.He argued that if you took up neo-classical architecture and built to reflect the great buildings of Europe, the results would be not grand but bizarre. And there were to be radial roads as favoured by the Australian architect Sulman. He also wanted to retain vistas of the surrounding mountains. Lakes were to run at right angles across the main road system.

  In the Australian style, there were immediate attacks on the winning design in most major newspapers. Many wanted grand classical buildings of the kind Australia lacked, and Palace of Versailles fountains. O’Malley himself sought to pick what he considered the best aspect from all three designs. He claimed that the conditions of the contest gave the government the right to use whatever it liked from all the entries. O’Malley referred the final designs to a departmental board for its advice and it produced a hybrid in which Griffin’s plans were dominant but not totally pursued. When Griffin saw its recommendations in Chicago he suggested the board meet him in Canberra, but the Australians were not keen on that.

  On 20 February 1913, construction of the city was formally commenced at a stage when the disappointed Burley Griffin was far away in Chicago. On a warm day on which the women who attended wisely kept their parasols fully deployed, O’Malley drove the first survey peg into open ground amongst gum trees. It was on 12 March that the chief ceremony, involving the naming of the city officially and celebrating the beginning of construction, would be held. Trains from Sydney and Melbourne came to Queanbeyan and brought, amongst other citizens, motion picture cameramen. The visitors moved in long lines of automobiles, cabs, sulkies, buggies and bicycles from Queanbeyan to the ceremonial site within the Capital Territory, inside whose margins O’Malley had prohibited ‘stagger juice’. ‘Canberra’ was of course expected to be the name announced. But as a result of government invitation, there had been 750 suggestions for the capital’s name. They included Sydmelbane, Sydmelperadbrisho, Wheatwoolgold, Kangaremu and Eucalypta. Others included Reveneulia, Gonebroke, Swindleville and Fisherburra. Further suggestions included Maxurba and Victoria Deferenda Defender. Those who did not like the prohibition on alcohol gave it names such as Thirstyville.

  A scatter of tents appropriate for a militia exercise appeared on the pastoral flats around the site before the official naming. From Duntroon marched the first class of cadets, to be inspected by Andrew Fisher and the sneeze-prone Lord Denman. Andrew Fisher, King O’Malley and Lord Denman laid three stones for a proposed Commencement Column which would never be built, and then the current Mrs O’Malley, Amy Garrod, a New Zealander, gave Lady Denman an ornamental gold case with the name in it, and at noon Lady Denman opened the case and made her statement: ‘I name the capital of Australia, Canberra.’ In a great marquee near the site a celebration banquet was then held for those fortunate enough to be invited.

  In the end Griffin would be brought to Australia to work on the scheme, but constant intrusions by bureaucrats drove him out by 1920. Early Canberra, according to Burley Griffin’s plan, hunkered low in the Molonglo Valley presenting very little of the greened aspect the city would later have. Cynics called it a good sheep station spoiled. On 9 May 1927, the federal Parliament would gather for the first time in the long, plain three-storey parliament building, but there had been something less than a rush to come to Canberra. Even by 1941 its population was barely 10 000, mainly bureaucrats and their families. The capital’s airfield was a rustic grass strip which had to be tested for firmness before planes could land there.

  But it was the capital.

  THE TRICK OF AVIATION

  Even allowing for the enthusiasm with which the rest of the world took to powered aviation, the Australians seized upon it with a prodigious vigour based on the size and unnegotiable nature of much of the interior and the ability of a flying machine to nullify distance. But aviation first appeared in Australia as a kind of magic trick, an extension of conjuring. Harry Houdini, the renowned magician, son of a rabbi, had bought a box-like aircraft named the Voisin in Germany, and had made some sort of brief wild flight in it there. Now he brought it with him on his tour of Australia. It was a biplane, its wings covered with fabric and lathe and connected by sections on which the word ‘Houdini’ was emblazoned. Houdini had been performing at Melbourne’s Opera House, but he slept in his hangar at Digger’s Rest with his plane each night waiting for the perfect morning to take off. When it came on 18 March 1910, he got himself airborne and made what was claimed to be the first ‘controlled’ flight in Australia. In fact Colin de Fries, an Englishman, had flown a Wright Model A aircraft about 115 yards (105 metres) at Sydney’s Victoria Racecourse on 9 December 1909. But it was indeed a modest hop compared to Houdini’s.

  Houdini flew three times on that morning of 18 March and on the second flight nearly crashed on landing. But the third flight at 7 a.m. was flawless. He took off in front of thirty witnesses, and though hampered by a cross current of wind he reached a height of from 90 to 100 feet (27.5 to 30.5 metres) throughout, and remained in the air for three minutes and 37 seconds. Houdini’s rival aviator, Ralph C. Banks, had bought a Wright Flyer and set it up at Digger’s Rest too, and had tried to fly on the morning of 1 March, but he crashed, the plane suffering minor damage. He would later sign the witness statement verifying Houdini’s fligh
t.

  Despite Houdini’s association with show business, he did warn spectators that day that this was something more than a stunt. It was more, he said, than the sort of ‘minor modification that is perpetual in any art’. This was something beyond even art. Later in March he flew the plane at Rosehill Racecourse in Sydney for over seven minutes.

  The previous year, the Commonwealth government was motivated to offer a prize of £5000 for a flying machine suitable for military purposes. The Victorian John R. Duigan won with a Wright-style glider which flew on a tether rope and by early October 1910 could travel nearly 200 yards (183 metres). Again, the achievement was a lesser one than Houdini’s, although Duigan would lead a squadron of the Australian Flying Corps on the Western Front, and be awarded the Military Cross on 9 May 1918 over Villers-Bretonneux.

  There were rumours that Houdini was encouraged to fly by a British friend, Lord Northcliffe, the newspaper magnate who was urging the creation of a British Ministry of Munitions to give publicity to the possibility of air power, for Northcliffe was alarmed that Japan was already building an air corps. Houdini’s flight thus fitted in well with Australian concerns. In fact, the Japanese air force consisted mainly of hot air balloons deployed in the Russian Japanese War of 1904–05, and it did not purchase its first aircraft, a Farman biplane, until 1910. But its very existence was motivation. The suspicion that Japan was slyly adopting new technologies was now very strong in the West.