With a conjuror's dramatic flourish, white-gloved National Archives conservator Ian Batterham whisked a white cloth away from a tabletop at Parliament House yesterday.
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His whisking revealed a priceless, 100-year-old, long-lost booklet that ACT Chief Minister Katy Gallagher described moments later in the ceremony as ''a fragment of Canberra's birth certificate''.
At 29 pages it is a very substantial fragment. It is a ''tall'' booklet containing the original prose document, typed but with handwritten passages and with diagrams, that Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin enclosed with their 1911 entry for the international competition for the design of Australia's capital city.
It is a kind of essay describing, often poetically, Walter Burley Griffin's grand vision of the city he designed to arise in the idyllic site beside the Molonglo.
This original artefact (there are very few, tidied-up copies made by officialdom) had been lost for decades and presumed lost forever. Then, very recently, the ACT government's centenary history and heritage adviser, David Headon, rediscovered it, with much rejoicing.
Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the announcement that the entry from the Griffins of Chicago had won the competition (from a field of 37).
Gallagher formally handed the document to the Commonwealth government (it will be housed in the National Archives), represented by Arts Minister Simon Crean.
Dr Headon explained that this was an endearing ''human, working document'' full of evidence (like rubbings-out, pencillings-in, uncorrected spellings) of the husband and wife rushing to meet the competition deadline.
Yes, every Canberran who has ever known the panic of rushing to get a school or uni essay in on time will feel a glow of empathy with the scrambling Chicagoans.
Dr Headon found the document - the second Griffins' treasure he's found in recent months - when he arranged for two co-searchers to sort through a great container load of unpromising papers hitherto held in Planning Institute of Australia storage in Fyshwick. Headon, not expecting anything special, asked his sifting colleagues to make a heap of anything ''vaguely historical''. When he started to fossick, the third thing in the heap was, his trained eye and mind and now quickly beating heart told him, the cardboard-covered long-lost document.
It went on display yesterday at the Grand Visions exhibition at Parliament House and when that exhibition closes it will be kept at the National Archives.
