And although it had all the pomp and ceremony that comes with official landmark events, the official naming ceremony for the brand new city of Canberra was held in empty, open bushland, with a few trees dotted around and Mount Ainslie in the distance.

Silent footage taken on March 12, 1913, of Lady Denman announcing the city's name, hats being thrown in the air and a 21-gun salute, is still rousing 100 years on.

But while it represented a new beginning, the proud faces beneath the grand hats and behind the moustaches couldn't have known that it was also a kind of ending.

War would break out in Europe the following year, and within a few short years, many of the 700 troops present at the ceremony - the Mounted Rifles, the Light Horse and the NSW Lancers - would be wounded or dead, killed at Gallipoli, or later in the trenches on the Western Front.

Among them at the ceremony was Major General William Bridges, the founder of Duntroon; he was killed by a sniper's bullet on May 15, 1915, the first Australian general to be killed in World War I.

He was also the only Australian killed in that war whose identified remains were brought back to Australia. He is buried on the slopes Mount Pleasant at Duntroon, in a grave designed by Walter Burley Griffin who, by 1915, had arrived in Australia to oversee the building of the city he had designed.

Cultural adviser to the Centenary of Canberra David Headon said the footage of the ceremony, which shows troops on horseback and young soldiers lined up beside Canberra's foundation stone, was made all the more poignant by history's intervention.

''It is sobering to look at the footage by Raymond Longford and to consider that with all the military parade with the dogs running around, not only would a very considerable percentage of them be killed within two to three years, but also that Bridges, the person who brought the cadets and established Duntroon in 1911, would himself, within weeks of the landing of Gallipoli, be dead,'' he said.

''He would be the only Australiansoldier, and quite possibly the only British Empire soldier, who was actually brought back to his original country, and buried here.''

He said the gravestone was also an important landmark because it was one of the few physical manifestations of Griffin's work that remained. ''It's the only physical fabric that we have, other than the physical footprint of the design of Canberra and a ceremonial mallet in the Parliament - this sombre and actually quite moving gravesite,'' he said.

As part of Canberra's centenary, the 1913 footage of the ceremony shot by famed filmmaker Raymond Longford has been digitally restored by the National Film and Sound Archive.

The 17-minute reel shows many well-dressed people arriving at the site and milling before the ceremony, troops on horseback riding up Camp Hill (roughly the location of Old Parliament House) towards the site, the moment of the official naming and the crowd cheering afterward.

From next week, the restored footage will be available on DVD, along with the opening of Parliament House in 1927, a 1958 Guide to Canberra and images of springtime around a very new Lake Burley Griffin in 1965.

See www.nfsa.gov.au for more details.