This, coupled with the lake-that-wasn't until 1964, public monuments that sat in paddocks for decades waiting for long delayed developments to eventually rise from the earth around them and the unquestionable cultural benefits that inevitably sprang from building an Australian Whitehall in the bush, can never be celebrated enough.

The waste disposal site in question, which shares Yarralumla with no lesser a light than the governor-general, is the former Canberra garbage incinerator.

In addition to its own substantial architectural merit (of which more later) it is also unique in that it is the only building in Canberra with a direct link to Walter Burley Griffin, the American ''prairie school'' architect who could have stepped straight out of the pages of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.

Griffin, whose second and last names were both appended to the city's central water feature due to a clerical error under the Menzies administration, managed to achieve the remarkable feat of having his moniker on the plans for the incinerator despite the professional handicap of being dead when they were drawn up.

While Griffin, who worked in partnership with his wife Marion, was a brilliant architect who rightly deserved to be chosen to design Canberra, Griffith and Leeton, the Australian government of the day never took much interest in his ideas for individual structures.

His association with the incinerator, which was originally commissioned to dispose of all of Canberra's commercial and domestic waste as an alternative to landfill, came about by accident. Incinerators were ''all the go'' in the first part of the 20th century and the Reverberatory Incinerator and Engineering Company was formed to take advantage of this by Nisson Leonard-Kanevsky in 1929.

Kanevsky, an engineer, had access to some remarkable technology that could dispose of almost any form of waste, including the solids from human sewage. What he needed were buildings in which to house his incinerators. Most of his commissions were given to the firm of Griffin-Nicholls, a three-way architectural partnership involving Walter, Marion, and their protege, Eric Nicholls who had begun working with the Griffins in 1921 when just 19.

The incinerator commissions were just Griffin's cup of tea. Inspired by the utilitarian ideals and simplicity of design made famous by his mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright, Griffin passionately believed buildings with a practical - and, in the eyes of some, mundane - purpose did not have to be blots on the landscape. ''The final test of modernism is the replacement of industrial eyesores with public amenities,'' he wrote in 1937. ''During the seven years of depression, whilst industrial growth had stopped, I fortunately found a field in which the architect could allay the suspicious fears and political animosities sufficiently to enable a dozen municipal authorities to determine upon sites within their boundaries for replacing dumps and other insanitary and uneconomic methods of disposal of public waste with quick incineration in monumental buildings. It has been intended that these buildings also awaken an aversion to the fundamentally uneconomic conditions of industrial ugliness.''

While Griffin may have thought he, his wife and Nicholls were modernists, more recent, and, one presumes better educated and more sophisticated, experts now know better.

''The incinerator building is a good example of the inter-war functionalist style, which displays key indicators of the style; asymmetrical massing, simple geometric shapes, a roof concealed by a parapet, and a radical, progressive image,'' the Register of Significant 20th Century Architecture states.

To return to Griffin, the designing genius with whom politicians and public servants of the day had a love-hate relationship, as I said his real achievement was to have his name attached to plans for a structure he did not design. This was not, I hasten to add, any attempt at self-glorification or a bid to usurp the credit that rightly belongs to another. The fault, if there was one, was that Nicholls was reluctant to take his mentor's name off the firm's letterhead even after his death. I suspect sentimental and practical considerations would each have played a part.

Griffin had travelled to India in 1935 to design buildings for the University of Lucknow.

He contracted peritonitis and died there in 1937, before the Canberra contract even came up for discussion.

Tenders for the Canberra incinerator were called in 1938 and it was in operation by the end of 1939. The incinerator was used to burn Canberra's ordinary waste in the 1940s and, when the city became too big for it to cope, was used for the destruction of classified documents.

It has not been used as an incinerator for 53 years and is one of the seven of 13 Griffin and Nicholls incinerators that still survives. None are currently in use.

Nestled in the Westbourne Woods, the incinerator remains a striking structure next to the 10th fairway of the Royal Canberra Golf Course.

The chimney soars 18 metres while the walls rise to 10 metres.