Marion Mahony Griffin and the Canberra plan (5km, easy)

Celebrate 60 years of Lake Burley Griffin by learning the true story of how it features in the international design competition for Australia's national capital.

Featuring landscape architect and scholar of Marion Mahony Griffin and Walter Burley Griffin, Adj Assoc Prof Dianne Firth, and presented by Canberra by Bike and Pedal Power ACT.

Two people helped make the winning entry for the plans for Canberra in the early 20th century, but only one is continually minimised. Know her name: Marion Mahony Griffin.

Take this rare chance to slowly ride the water and land axis lines of the original Canberra plan, and learn what makes it unique. Discover what Marion Mahony Griffin and her husband and collaborator, Walter Burley Griffin, intended for the national capital, and why we have a National Triangle. See the Griffins' plans for what we today call Canberra. And learn why it was Marion whose genius and eye helped to render into reality the architectural designs of her more prominent colleagues, Frank Lloyd Wright and Burley Griffin.

Hear directly from Adj Assoc Prof Firth, a landscape architect, academic and artist, who did her doctorate on 'Behind the Landscape of Lake Burley Griffin: landscape, water, politics and the national capital’. Her current exhibition, Poetry of the Lakes, honours both Canberra's main lake, and Lake George/Weereewa in southern NSW, is showing at Belconnen Arts Centre until 1 Dec 2024.

Route: We'll meet at the barbecue area at Henry Rolland Park beside Lake Burley Griffin.