The Butters Bridge, looking too high and mighty (it stands 25 metres tall and is 242 metres long) for the skinny stretch of the lower Molonglo it crosses, was dedicated at a ceremony on Friday.
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The slender, elegant bridge, lauded as one of the longest pedestrian bridges in the southern hemisphere (pedestrians and cyclists will share its walking width of just five metres) is named after Sir John Henry Butters (1885-1969).
Butters was a distinguished engineer and from 1925-1929 was the first chief commissioner of the Federal Capital Territory.
Some of Sir John's grandchildren and their families were at the weatherbeaten event at the bridge just off the Coppins Crossing Road.
The gale rattled the marquee in which speeches were made. When Butters' granddaughters Angela Alcock and Penny Herold ventured out on to the windswept bridge to be photographed by The Canberra Times far below them the little Molonglo, energised by the recent rains, was audibly seething and splashing.
If Sir John was with us in spirit on Friday then the sheer engineering smartness of the bridge named after him will have appealed to him because it doubles as a piece of sewerage infrastructure. It carries a discreet 600 millimetre sewerage pipe across the Molonglo from south to north. Butters while chief commissioner took a creative engineer's keen interest in Canberra's sewerage solutions.
On Friday his granddaughter Angela, from Sydney, was a little anxious that some media attention to what she thinks is so "stunning" a bridge honouring her grandfather ("Poppa really was a wonderful man") has been making frivolous mention of its sewerage-moving function.
"But that's the least important thing about this magnificent bridge ... and when I first came down and saw it I thought as soon as I saw it that there was absolutely no reason why our family couldn't put the family name on the bridge. It really is superb, and modern and quite classic."
One doesn't have to be a (perhaps slightly biased) Butters to admire the bridge. Designed by Grimshaw Architects, it is fetchingly impressive right down to its high-quality finish ironbark timber rails for folk to lean against while ogling the views.
On Friday those views from the bridge of the bustling river, of the presently emerald-green Molonglo Valley under a dramatic sky of brooding clouds were memorable in the extreme.
The Butters Bridge is reached from a new road that leaves the Coppins Crossing Road. It seems a remote place now (on Friday you'd never have known there was a city nearby) but is expected to be a valuable addition to the recreational amenities for the growing Molonglo Valley district planned to eventually consist of 13 suburbs with a population of more than 70,000.
