The Cinderella of Australia

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The Cinderella of Australia

A Provisional Parliament House

By Sylvia Marchant

This was the colourful description of the proposed Provisional Parliament House by the then President of the Senate, Thomas Givens, in 1923. A Provisional Parliament House was proposed because a litany of unfortunate delays and circumstances had held up the establishment of a Parliament House in Canberra after Federation in1901, including the cancellation of the Architectural Competition to design a permanent Federal Parliament House in accordance with the Griffin architectural plan. The requirement for the capital to be built in New South Wales and at least one hundred miles from Sydney and the advent of the First World War in 1914 were the major delaying factors. In the meantime the Federal Government sat in the elaborate Victorian Parliament House in Melbourne and it was not until 1921 that renewed efforts were made to establish the Parliament in Canberra.¹.

By that time the establishment of a proper Federal Seat of Government in the Capital was becoming urgent. Yet the expense of a large permanent building, when there was still a huge war debt, seemed too ambitious and the time required to conduct an international architectural competition to replace the one cancelled in 1913 and then raise a monumental building, made such a project impractical. A faster, more economical solution was sought.² After much debate a recommendation by the Committee of Public Works for a provisional building was accepted and financed by Parliament in August 1923.

The Advisory Committee considered that the time was not yet ripe for the erection of the permanent monumental Parliament House at Canberra, for the reasons that it might be expected to cost anything up to two or two and a half million pounds: that the actual construction of the building would take perhaps seven years or longer, and that a former Government of the Commonwealth had made a promise to the architects of the world that when the erection of the permanent building was contemplated the design of the building would be selected as the result of a world-wide competition.³

With this recommendation the idea of a monumental building was put aside in favour of a more efficient, economical and timely structure. The Minister for Works and Railways (P.G. Stewart) said of the proposal, at the ceremony of the turning of the first sod: 'While its design is on simple and economic lines, it will be substantially constructed in brick and will be of a commodious and comfortable character, presenting a good appearance architecturally'.⁴

The Federal Capital Advisory Committee, formed to advise the government on the project, recommended in its first report in 1921, that the building should be 'without pretension either in scale or architectural adornment' and 'the external architecture simple but decorous'.⁵ With these provisions in mind John Smith Murdoch, a Scotsman and the first Australian Commonwealth architect, was duly commissioned to design the building. Smith was not an admirer of ornate or 'monumental' architecture as is apparent in his dismay when the Empire Parliamentary Association presented a faithful copy of the Pugin designed House of Commons Speaker's Chair to the House of Representatives. As he expressed it:

The Westminster Chair, as I remember it, is of most elaborate Gothic canopied design, ... quite out of keeping with the simple, severe, free renaissance character of the Canberra building.⁶

His objections were overruled.

There were also strong protests against the idea of a provisional building and the Senate tried to reject the suggestion while, as already stated, Thomas Givens thought it would make the 'Federal Capital City the Cinderella of Australia'.⁷ In addition Murdoch's 'plain interior' came in for harsh criticism and he was forced to defend it in his evidence to the committee:

I can say that the proposed building, although called a provisional structure, will prove so comfortable that there will be no great haste exhibited by members to erect and occupy an ornate permanent building.⁸

Unpretentiousness was definitely achieved in the resulting plain but stately, two-storey white building. Described as of 'stripped classical' style it is dignified and functional, with verandas and colonnades and a strong, balanced and elegant profile.The happy result of economies of scale and shortness of time produced a building that was anything but 'monumental', instead it is a simple, unembellished structure with an understated elegance and charm of its own.⁹

The building has not functioned as a Parliament since 1988, when the vision of a monumental parliament building was achieved. It is now known as 'the Museum of Australian Democracy in Old Parliament House' instead of the 'Provisional Parliament House' under which label it spent its first 62 years. While the building does not exude authority or power in the way of other more monumental Parliament buildings, nevertheless, over the years it has achieved respect and affection as an icon, which in itself is a subtle source of power.

Sylvia Marchant

1 Gay Hogan, Parliament House Canberra, 1927, Records Relating to the Design, Construction and Opening of the Provisional Parliament House, (Canberra: Australian Archives, 1997), pp.9-10.

2 Hogan, Parliament House Canberra, 1927, p.10.

3 Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works, Report Together with Minutes of Evidence, Appendices and Plans Relating to the Proposed Erection of Provisional Parliament House, Canberra, p.17.

4 Hogan, Parliament House Canberra, 1927, p.13.

5 Federal Capital Advisory Committee, Construction of Canberra: First General Report, (Melbourne: Government of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1921), p.11.

6J.S. Murdoch to Mr Gale, Honorary Secretary, Australian Branch, Empire Parliamentary Association, 5 August 1925. NAA A1, 1923/20992, Erection of Provisional Parliament House, Canberra. Copies of many of these records are also available in the papers of Professor Gordon Stanley Reid, and the research file for his unpublished chronology of the Federal Parliament 1901-1988, NLA MS 8371.

7 The Honorable Thomas Givens, Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works, 'Report Together with Minutes of Evidence, Appendices and Plans Relating to the Proposed Erection of Provisional Parliament House, Canberra ', p.11.

8 Ibid., p.24.

9 Old Parliament House website http://www.oph.gov.au/content. Accessed 10 April 2008.