Canberra: a sheep in wolf’s clothing

Abstract

Canberra, the capital of the Commonwealth of Australia, was built as a symbol of a new nation. The city's symbolism is dominated by an optic axis, provided by the masterplan of Walter Burley Griffin. The dominant message of the objects at the poles of this axis, the Parliament House and the War Memorial, is nationalism. The Parliament House brings the nation together at one point and the War Memorial specifies that the Australian national is tough, resourceful, and comradely. By its reference to heroic deeds in wartime, the War Memorial gives a belligerent message in an otherwise peaceful landscape. Women and spiritual religions are conspicuously absent from Canberra. There is a remarkable tolerance towards other nations leaving their symbolic footprint in Canberra. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.

Monuments to the Duke of Wellington in nineteenth-century Ireland: forging British and imperial identities

“…These monuments were studied in the field, during which observable data was compiled and recorded and photographs were taken. This is an approach previously utilised and endorsed by geographers such as Freek Colombijn (1998), who included these techniques as part of a broader 'anthropological tourism' methodology devised by Colombijn to undertake an investigation of the symbolic landscape of Australia's capital city Canberra. Efforts were then made to reconstruct as complete a picture of the monuments' nineteenth-century life histories as possible, an operation performed through examination of contemporary archival material.…”

Urban Anthropology

“…Cities seem to abound in symbols (Nas, 2011) that can be used to characterize them and to describe their soul. Shahshahani (1998) has analyzed Esfahan in Iran and Colombijn (1998) Canberra in Australia to mention a few examples. This urban symbolism approach corresponds to the insights of Lefebvre (1974) into the production of space, that distinguishes natural space, the perception of space, and the representation of space; Harvey (1990) on time and space; and the work of Nora (1984-92) and his realms of memory.…”

Encrypted Landscapes, Nation-States

“…To analyze the symbolic meanings behind Walter Burley Griffin's design of Canberra is to tread a well-worn path forged by anthropologists, such as Colombijn (1998), as well as architects and historians (Firth, 2000(Firth, , 2001Proudfoot, 1994;Reid, 2002;Styles, 1995;Vernon, 2005). Canberra, the city, was built relatively recently, and in a period of such acute self-awareness of the relevance of the nation-state, that one may be forgiven for supposing that it was designed with the research projects of future scholars in mind!…”