Canberrans, have you ever felt, looking at Lake Burley Griffin, that it is looking back at you, communicating with you?
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
No, neither have I. Not in 40 years. But while I was preparing this essay about our birthday lake I listened with envy to writer Nick Thorne rejoicing over his relationship with the river Danube. He has lived with it (at Budapest) for half of his life. He says he's seen the famously blue river being all sorts of colours including "green, brown, yellow and black, and my favourite, silver".
He loves "the changing texture of its surface" and the way in which, when he's looking at it, "I feel it looking back at me."
We should, shouldn't we, have feelings about waters we live beside? If Canberrans don't feel a passion for the lake like Thorne's passion for the Danube at Budapest, is it the lake's fault?
For 50 years Lake Burley Griffin has been the "ornamental waters" the federal capital city had to have. But has the lake, strangely estranged from its city and from Canberrans, been nothing but an ornament?
Hands up those of you who have ever so much as dipped a toe in it or been out on it in a boat. Yes, about one Canberran in a thousand! How different the result when we ask Genevans about their frolicking relationship with Lake Geneva.
A garden gnome ornaments a rockery and a Tony Abbott snow dome (I have one) ornaments a desk or mantelpiece. But when an ornament serves no purpose it gathers dust and is no fun. Lake Burley Griffin is seldom used by Canberrans and has hardly ever been any fun, save for the popular Birdman rallies of the 80s.
In March 1914 Walter Burley Griffin discussed his vision for Canberra with a reporter from the Chicago Record-Herald.
"Mr Griffin says that it was while [paddling a canoe on local waterways] that he had impressed upon him so vividly the possibilities … for beautifying a region with artistic waterways. He had this impression in mind when he was planning for the future Australian capital, especially as Australia had a dry season which makes the presence of a permanent body of water a great blessing."
All Australian federal capital city design competitors were instructed that ornamental waters were an essential, wherever it was built. Without that fashion, that landscape architecture trend, we might not have a lake at all. The federal capital might instead be beside a living river.
Walter and Marion's first imagined "permanent body of water" here was a series of five interconnected basins and lakes. They were to be in what their biographer calls "varying degrees of formality". Today we have one intimidatingly vast lake as formal as can be.
Well-travelled readers will have noticed how a town or city arranged near great waters takes lots of its character from that relationship. This reporter's idyllic childhood was spent in a seaside town adjusted to the caprices of the North Sea. Chicago is the city it is because of Lake Michigan. The edges of a city and its great waters usually blur and blend. It is part of Canberra's oddness that the city and the lake have never had anything to do with one another.
Several things are to blame. Motor-powered boats are banned, and their absence limits ways we can engage joyfully with the lake. The ban keeps the watery wastes uneventful and sepulchre-quiet.
Then, puritanical planning has until now (rejoice, rejoice at the Kingston Foreshores and at our government's City To The Lake visions!) kept the CBD, our workplaces and our homes away from the waters' edges. But nearby waters should shape a city. When we are downtown we should see the water at the ends of streets, and be able to smell it. Lake Burley Griffin's total lack of any aroma is as creepy in a lake as it would be in lover.
Then, the waters themselves have kept Canberrans at bay. They are often repellent even to look at. In recent weeks the lake has looked like something made with Gravox. Then, sometimes the waters are so toxically nasty that the government prohibits all uses of them. In his recent lake-kicking essay Dr Jamie Pittock derided the lake as a carp-infested "cesspit".
Some of my Canberra Times colleagues have written lovely reminiscences of family outings to the lake's shores. And yet what's more remarkable is how little family use we make of the lake as a place for paddles and swims and picnics. Trips to the lake stand out in the family memory because they are so infrequent, so novel.
Since the Birdman Rallies' demise Canberra's en masse visits to the lake are very rare, although the annual Skyfire display of fireworks synchronised with music has been popular since 1988. But we do usually shun the lake and so what possessed the 100,000 of us to arrange ourselves around it on July 13, 1997 for the tragic implosion of the hospital? In a poem (first published by The Canberra Times) Geoff Page thought all of us there were like the crowds that used to go, for an outing, to public hangings in London. He was right. Canberrans seldom crowd down to the lake for anything joyous but had flocked there for something so ghoulish as the demolition of a building that had strong births and deaths associations for tens of of thousands of us.
To test against my long-held impressions of the lake and Canberrans being strangers I spent a lot of the last two weekends (of beautiful lake-enhancing weather) taking my open mind to lakeside haunts and vantage places.
Alas, the lake's vast deserts of water were almost always bereft of any human activity. There was an occasional brief regatta of white-sailed yachts beetling around on the gravy for a little while near Spinnaker Island, but that was about it. On some days the only human activity would be the dot of just one wind surfer or paddleboarder in the immensity of the gruel-coloured, carp-harbouring waters. In the deathly lakeside quiet one could hear a platypus clear its throat. Real cities are places where things happen, and so a city's lake on which nothing happens is eerie.
My peregrinations found quite a lot of lakeside activity. Lennox Gardens is the jewel in the crown of well-used lakeside venues and attracts picnic groups of folk of assorted ethnicities. But almost none of the lakeside activity observed actually involved any use or even acknowledgement of the lake. Canberra's best parks are near the lake (and so people use them), but they are not of the lake, and could be anywhere.
At the lake's few forlorn imitation beaches (the one on the tip of Weston Park even seems to be blessed with soft, Bondiesque, sea-beachy sand) I never saw anyone in the water (although several dogs thought the waters a joy).
The lake has almost always seemed ornamental to the point of desolation. I didn't recognise the Lake Burley Griffin that Dale Middleby described in a recent Panorama as "a busy waterway" humming with half the city's population of frolicking Canberra putting the lake to a miscellany of uses. Dale and I have not been living with the same body of water.
But the lake has its virtues.
As a piece of planning and on-time engineering and decision-making it was a jewel and a triumph.
It has created a habitat for a miscellany of wild creatures and so contributes mightily to the bushiness of the Bush Capital.
Chris Davey of the Canberra Ornithologists Group has long kept an ornithological eye on the lake. He says that as well as thinking of the actual lake's importance to birds we should notice how the lake's creation has probably transformed the Jerrabomberra Wetlands (there was probably only occasional water there before the lake) a famous habitat and hotspot for birds. It is largely for and because of those wetlands that Latham's Snipe graces us with its presence, flying here after breeding in Japan.
Davey says that as well as the lake's conspicuous swans and pelicans the lake has been a boon for all sorts of "diving, fishing" species, like the Little Black Cormorant and the Australian Darter. The Clamorous Reed-Warbler warbles from the reeds at the lake's Yarramundi Reach. The lake is blessed with crakes, rails and bitterns, with a plethora of duck species and of course with a panoply of swamphens.
He says that given that the Molonglo that the lake has succeeded was only "a typical sort of creek really, lined with willows" it seems unlikely it was bursting with its successor's abundance and variety.
The lake often is, in certain lights and from certain angles and on days when it is being a fog factory (for fog beautifies everything) very, very beautiful, and an ornament to the city. Three or four times a year winds whip it up into a photogenic frenzy of choppiness. We like that because, at last, the lake is showing some character.
And if the lake is aloof and a disappointment now perhaps, by its 100th birthday, it will have become this city's friend and playmate?
Surely a 50th birthday is far too early to judge an artificial lake that may last for ever. That is unless, one day, as imagined by Dr Pittock in his essay, governments accept that it is a mistake and dismantle the Scrivener Dam, giving us back the dear little babbling trickle of the Molonglo.
That would be my choice, but what if, 50 years hence, the lake is less forbidding and we have learned to embrace and use the lake and treat it as part of the city? What if, spending more time in and on it we can see it being green one day, silver the next, and begin to notice the changing textures of its surface? What if, when the Canberrans of 2064 look appreciatively at the lake they see it looking appreciatively back at them?
For the time being though, when we look at Lake Burley Griffin, 50, it looks away.