Lake Burley Griffin was a huge mistake ... for the first six months at least

This year marks 60 since Canberra’s jewel in the crown sparkled for the first time.

On 17 October 1964, Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies declared Lake Burley Griffin officially “inaugurated”.

But despite the fact it was written into the city’s plan pretty much ever since Walter Burley Griffin sharpened his pencils, and today forms the border of perhaps Canberra’s busiest walking loop, there were many long decades when it wasn’t there, and then many months when people wondered if it was all a big mistake.

So why did it take so long to build? And then fill up?

David Bate was a project director with the National Capital Development Commission (NCDC) from 1968 to 1973 but remembers discussions he had with Commissioner John Overall, who oversaw the lake’s construction from 1959 to 1963.

The delay was first caused by World War I when a Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works ruled that “construction of the full lake scheme” was “at the present time … unwarranted”. This was followed a few years later by the Great Depression and then World War II, and finally, a golf club.

Yes, that’s right – but this wasn’t just any golf club. It was the Royal Golf Club.

As Sir Robert quipped in his inauguration speech, “There were powerful forces against me because there was a golf course and all the heads of all the departments belonged to it.”

As Mr Bate explains, there were basically “three tiers” of golf clubs in Canberra at the time.

“If you were at the departmental secretary level, you played at Royal Canberra in Acton; if you were on the second level, you played at Red Hill; and if you were a grade one or two public servants, you played at one in the northern suburbs.”

So asking Royal Canberra to relocate to Yarralumla was no small ask in what was almost entirely a public-service town.

Then there were lingering disagreements over the design.

“Some wanted to put another bridge across the lake, extending across the Central Basin from Anzac Parade to Parliament House, but that was squashed,” Mr Bate says.

“And there was some discussion about extending the East Basin out towards Fyshwick, and installing a weir near Acton in the West Basin and just having a wide stream of water up to the dam.”

But Mr Bate says what may have really pushed construction to start was a visit by the Queen in 1954.

“At the time, Parliament House was in the middle of a sheep paddock … and Menzies was a bit embarrassed about the Bush Capital so he gave the Queen a vision.”

It was grandstanding on the part of the prime minister, in effect, promising the Queen a beautiful sprawling lake within sight of Parliament House. In fact, the plan was that on a future visit, Her Majesty would be able to board a yacht near Government House and sail up the lake, disembarking where Queen Elizabeth Terrace is today and walking through crowds of onlookers up to Parliament House from there.

But “that never happened”, and for a long time, people wondered if the lake would ever eventuate too.

The floodgates at Scrivener Dam shut in September 1963, with the expectation the lake would be full by Christmas. But half a year went by, and the bed was littered with nothing by the odd puddle and – being summer – breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

Mr Bate was living in Sydney at the time and remembers reading of the despair in the newspapers.

“It was a topic across the country and people were beginning to wonder what on earth was going to happen,” he recalls.

“They’ve done measurements obviously of flows, but the problem was that there was a drought. So the local community thought that this is what we’re going to have to put up for a long time to come.”

But come March 1964, the naysayers disappeared. The clouds broke, and sweet rain filled the lake to the brim within six days. The waters were christened with a world-first ‘Hovercraft Race’ on 14 March, followed by the Australian National Regatta from 30 April.

“People were very pleased with the fact they had this huge water feature, and it did have a positive impact on the local climate, too,” Mr Bate says.

The only trouble was that the NCDC’s chief traffic engineer couldn’t take his V8 boat on the lake because of the rule against power boats.

But all these years later, are we missing anything else? Maybe the tunnels, and yes, there are tunnels hiding deep beneath the lake’s surface.

“There’s a fault line that runs from roughly where City Hill is, under Commonwealth Avenue Bridge, up towards Capital Hill and there are limestone caverns all the way long there,” Mr Bate explains.

“And when they were drilling the foundations for the National Library, the workers lost a drill bit – it just disappeared down a hole.”

What do you remember about the filling of Lake Burley Griffin?