Qualla: Parliament House, Canberra

Parliament House, Canberra: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adam Carr at English Wikipedia, Public domain. You can walk on the roof. That single fact tells you almost everything about the building Australians chose for the seat of their democracy. When the Italian-born architect Romaldo Giurgola won the competition to design a new Parliament House in 1980, his radical idea was not to build upward but to disappear. He sliced the top off Capital Hill, set the parliament inside the cavity, and replaced the soil so that grassy lawns sloped back over the structure. The land the people own runs straight across the heads of the people they elect. Above it all rises a stainless-steel flagpole 81 metres tall, the one element Giurgola allowed himself to make unmistakable from the air.

Image: Adam Carr at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Parliament House, Canberra: The Compromise on the Hill

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rob Young from United Kingdom, CC BY 2.0. Australia became a nation in 1901, and almost immediately its two biggest cities began sulking. Melbourne and Sydney each wanted to be the capital, and neither would concede to the other. The solution written into Section 125 of the Constitution was almost comic in its diplomacy:...

Image: Rob Young from United Kingdom | CC BY 2.0

Parliament House, Canberra: Sixty-One Years of "Temporary"

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit gabecollett, CC BY-SA 4.0. The provisional parliament was supposed to last fifty years at most. It lasted sixty-one. By its final decade, Old Parliament House was so cramped that members worked elbow to elbow, and the cry to build something permanent grew impossible to ignore. In 1978 the Fraser government...

Image: gabecollett | CC BY-SA 4.0

Parliament House, Canberra: A Flag the Size of a Bus

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Feral Arts, CC BY 2.0. The flagpole is not decoration. Giurgola designed its four splayed legs to trace the outline of the grand domed capitol that the city's original planner, Walter Burley Griffin, had once imagined for this exact spot. The pole weighs roughly 250 tonnes of polished stainless steel a...

Image: Feral Arts | CC BY 2.0

Parliament House, Canberra: Tracks Toward the Centre

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Harishrawat11, CC BY-SA 3.0. Before a visitor reaches the chambers, the forecourt makes a quieter argument. Its surface holds a mosaic of 90,000 hand-cut granite stones called Possum and Wallaby Dreaming, designed by the Warlpiri artist Michael Nelson Jagamara from country near Papunya. Three stonemasons spe...

Image: Harishrawat11 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Parliament House, Canberra: The Building That Argues With Itself

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jason Antony (Alexanderino), CC BY 2.5. Not everyone has loved the result, and the criticism is revealing. The design was conceived in the late 1970s, in the anxious aftermath of the 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam government and a hotel bombing in Sydney, so security shaped the brief. The answer was to wall the executiv...

Image: Jason Antony (Alexanderino) | CC BY 2.5