Lake Burley Griffin should be renamed after Robert Menzies

The Menzies cabinet, while Menzies was abroad, had decided informally that the lake should be named after Menzies, so as to recognise that he was as much the father of modern Canberra as anyone else, including Griffin. But Menzies, when told of the idea, firmly ruled it out and wanted the lake to be name after the man who conceived it.

No doubt he imagined what his political enemies would have said, which would have been something similar to what would have been said had Kevin Rudd named the monstrous ASIO headquarters after himself rather the hapless (but helpless) Ben Chifley, or if Tony Abbott had renamed Manly after himself.

In any event, by firm tradition, Australians and Australian governments have never named anything permanent after live Australians, or indeed, live people other than the sovereign. This is in part because a tendency for living paragons to fall out of favour, for example, by being convicted in their dotage of paedophilia.

Menzies was also well known, after retirement, for declaring that he did not want a Canberra suburb named after himself, in the manner that all (dead) Australian prime ministers are honoured, and, no doubt, all future dead ones, other than Malcolm Fraser, will be. (Malcolm Fraser will have to have some other memorial, perhaps a major freeway, because there is already a suburb of Fraser, named after long-term local member Jim Fraser.)

Heather Henderson, Canberra citizen and daughter of Sir Robert, is the moral executor of this wish, even as she is also a proud and fond daughter who has done much, with books in recent years, to revive admiration for her father as a human being with a great affection for the city he did so much to create and to develop, and of which he was so proud.

But it would be better if Menzies' view was regarded instead as an idea that if history were to judge that his achievements deserved honour, it should involve more than a mere suburb. No Australian prime minister, before or after, had such a personal hand in the creation of the Canberra we know, played such a role in its development, or, of course, lived in the Lodge, in many respects as an ordinary Canberra citizen, for so long a period.

The daughter knows well that her father deserves more. In a recent book she expressed her pleasure at the opening, in 2006, of the R.G. Menzies Walk on the north side of the lake. "It could not be a more appropriate memorial," she wrote. "It is next to his lake, it looks across to his parliament house, it is in the capital city of his country, and - as a bonus - he enjoyed walking."

But the case for making the lake itself his memorial does not turn on his mere affection for the city, nor his role in restarting, after a 30-year-hiatus, the construction and building of the national city. It turns on his critical relationship with the building of the lake itself. The interventions of Menzies were critical to the establishment of the lake, and, had it not been for Menzies, it was quite possible that Treasury and the statesmen of the day, in a way that compromised the idea forever, would have decided that the lake idea was too expensive, too silly, too likely to attract political criticism for extravagance and delusions of grandeur and, perhaps, too likely to divide permanent an already sparse country town.

Menzies' 1970 memoir The Measure of the Years contains an essay of affection for a city Menzies confessed he had not much loved when first he went there in 1934.

"The population was about 9000; one could walk around it without undue discomfort on a Saturday afternoon. In the great centres of population, it was referred to as the 'bush capital'. Facetious people would suggest it be used as an insanity-treatment centre. One wit referred to it as 'six villages in search of a city'."

But Menzies described how he came to see that the decision to have Canberra as the national capital had already been taken and was not going to change. It had to be made a worthy one: "Something the Australian people would come to admire and respect; something that would be a focal point for national pride and sentiment."

Picking up city development from where it had stalled in the late 1920s included reconsideration of a lake of the sort Griffin had planned. The Griffin plan envisaged a lake, but of a somewhat different sort.

The Griffins had seen the records of Molonglo River floods, and sketched out a lake from a contour map. But they then sought to make its shapes geometric - with circles and straight lines, in a manner ultimately not followed. In my opinion, at least, going natural rather than sculptured, has enhanced both the general Griffin design and its "Australianness".

But if there was some agreement about the need to fill out the city, there was antagonism to the lake. For one thing, the Canberra Golf Club was in possession of a good deal of the flood plain, and the Racecourse another. Many prominent public servants had no enthusiasm for losing land, and provided what Menzies called "a good deal of active and passive resistance".

It was also argued that a lake would increase an already existing separation caused by the river and the river flats. Menzies argued that a properly landscaped and planted lake and foreshores would become a real centre of a unified city, lending itself to the construction of splendid bridges, easy road communications, and tourism and help build up the city as a capital in the minds and eyes of the Australian people.

Menzies kept a close eye on NCDC plans to develop Canberra and organise for shifting thousands of public servants, mostly from Melbourne, into new model suburbs. But he nagged about the lake. A million-pound plan to start work on it received tentative approval, but, when Menzies went abroad, it disappeared from the menu.

After Menzies returned, he asked his cabinet whether he was rightly informed that Treasury had succeeded in having cabinet kill off the proposal.

"The reply was yes, and that cabinet had agreed," he said. "I then said, 'Well, can I take it that by unanimous consent of ministers the item is now struck in?'.

"A lot of laughter ran around the cabinet room; there were some matters on which they reasonably thought the old men should be humoured; and needless to say, Overall's men [from the National Capital Development Commission] were on the job next morning."

Does recognising the role of Menzies, perhaps apparently at the immediate expense of Walter Griffin (who never made use of his middle name) detract from the honour the Griffins deserve as the American conceivers of a great Australian city plan? Hardly, and not only because the old city is itself a great monument, and to the man and his wife, rather than only the man. The pair deserve a great monument, perhaps a populist one, given their democratic view of what the city could be.

That could be achieved, for example, if city planners revived their drawings for a great causeway, probably a raised walking path, through the wetlands from Sturt Avenue to Russell Hill. It would complete the geometry of the great plan, and embrace in low-scale architecture some of the relationship of land and people that Marion and Walter Griffin encapsulated. By then, of course, the Griffin legatees in both the National Capital Authority and the ACT Legislative Assembly will have destroyed the idea, the ideal and the vision of Constitution Avenue, but at least some better governors in the future - a new generation of the Menzies family perhaps - will have a signpost of what could be achieved by a bulldozer.

Jack Waterford is Editor-at-Large.

jack.waterford@fairfaxmedia.com.au