Qualla: Lake Burley Griffin

Lake Burley Griffin: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shkuru Afshar, CC BY-SA 4.0. For fifty years it existed only as a shape on a drawing. Walter Burley Griffin sketched a great ornamental lake at the centre of his 1912 plan for Canberra, its basins arranged so the city's axes would line up with the surrounding hills. But the water did not come. Through two world wars, the Depression, decades of political wrangling and Griffin's own departure in 1920, the Molonglo River wandered through farmland where the lake was meant to gleam, and Canberra was mocked as "several suburbs in search of a city." When the dam gates finally closed in September 1963, a drought refused to cooperate, and the basin sat stubbornly half-empty. Not until April 1964 did the rains arrive to fill it.

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Image: Shkuru Afshar | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lake Burley Griffin: A Prime Minister's Obsession

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit pfctayelise (improved by Sardaka 31.1.12), CC BY 3.0. The lake might never have happened without Robert Menzies. Australia's longest-serving prime minister had once regarded the unfinished capital as a national embarrassment, and over time his contempt curdled into a kind of crusade. He sacked two ministers he felt lacked intensity ...

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Image: pfctayelise (improved by Sardaka 31.1.12) | CC BY 3.0

Lake Burley Griffin: Engineering an Ornament

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bidgee, CC BY-SA 3.0. Beneath its placid surface, the lake is a feat of engineering. It stretches 11 kilometres long and as much as 1.2 kilometres wide, holding some 33 million cubic metres of water against the 33-metre wall of Scrivener Dam - named for Charles Scrivener, the surveyor who chose Canber...

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Image: Bidgee | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lake Burley Griffin: The Shore of a Nation

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shkuru Afshar, CC BY-SA 4.0. Griffin wanted the lake to be the foreground of the capital, and so it became. Along its edges rose the institutions of the country: the National Library opened in 1968, the High Court and the National Gallery followed around 1980, and in 1988 the new Parliament House crowned Cap...

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Image: Shkuru Afshar | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lake Burley Griffin: Twenty-Five Kilometres of Edge

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lorienismo, CC BY-SA 3.0. To Canberrans the lake is less a monument than a backyard. A shared path runs almost the full 40-kilometre shoreline, broken into three loops by the two great bridges, so a runner or cyclist can take on the 3.7-kilometre "bridge to bridge" or the full circuit of roughly 32 kilome...

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Image: Lorienismo | CC BY-SA 3.0