Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2024L00408:front:0:p84
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2024L00408
Segment Type: other
Provision Reference: 
Character Range: 249552–252526

the site.

      4.5.3  Values as Part of the Parliament House Vista

   The AWM is included in the CHL citation for the Parliament House Vista. The following quotations from the Summary Statement of Significance for the Parliament House Vista help to draw out the heritage values of the AWM in its broader context.

      Design Importance
      The Parliament House Vista is the central designed landscape of Canberra, that expresses the core of the Walter Burley Griffin design vision for Canberra. It is highly significant for its symbolic representation of the democratic interchange between the people and their elected representatives and its use of the natural landforms to generate a strong planning geometry. It expresses a masterly synthesis and ordering of topographical features and administrative

    functions to meet the needs of a national capital. The vista landscape embraces the central land axis and part of the water axis and most of the Parliamentary Triangle including the area known as the Parliamentary Zone. The significance incorporates Walter Burley Griffin's vision for the area, as the focus of Commonwealth parliamentary and governmental activity as well as national cultural life. This vision has been partly realised and the place is the setting for major, government, judicial and cultural institutions. The northern extent of the vista of Anzac Parade and the Australian War Memorial, despite differing from the original plan, are significant for memorial purposes developed in response to the needs of the people. Despite being modified to a lesser degree to accommodate the impact of wars on Australians, the Vista now presents as a philosophical concept expressed in urban planning, landscape and architecture, to achieve a grand vision of a symbolic, unified and visually dramatic place. (Criterion F.1)
    (Australian Historic Themes 7.4 Federating Australia, 8.10, Pursuing excellence in the arts and sciences)

    The Parliament House Vista incorporating the central national area, is the core of the most ambitious and most successful example of twentieth century urban planning in Australia. It is important for its design pattern with large landscape and waterscape spaces with their enframement by treed avenues and at the lake by bridges, the terminal vista features of the Australian War Memorial and Mount Ainslie at the northern end and Parliament House at the southern end, with the Carillon and Captain Cook Jet creating balanced vertical features in the water plane. (Criterion F.1).

    Historic Importance
    The area has been associated since 1941 with the development of Australian cultural life and national identity through the presence of such institutions as the Australian War Memorial, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Science and Technology Centre and the National Library of Australia. The national cultural institutions reinforce the national character of the area and are an important