Our capital territory, as finally settled at Canberra, covers 2,356 sq km. Then they needed a design for the city and nothing less than an international competition would do, one to be supervised by that truculent gargoyle of politics, King O'Malley. Since few, if any, of the competitors had the faintest idea of the landscape, the results were bound to be fanciful. Working from a copy of a cycloramic painting of the site along with contour maps and such, they sent entries replete with towers, cupolas, domes, balustrades, ornamental steps and at least one ziggurat - one childhood dream of cloudland after another. Pop history says two Chicagoans, Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion, won.
Pop history is only half right.
Two assessors out of three voted for the Griffin designs and O'Malley, the Minister for Home Affairs, gave them the prize. Immediately he began to meddle. They might get the prize but he would be the grand master. An O'Malligatawny stew of bad ideas. Fortunately, O'Malley lost office for a while and Griffin was invited here to get the work going.