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The Canberra Times
The Canberra Times
National
Steve Evans

Walter Burley Griffin's wife comes out of the shadows

A likeness of Marion Mahony Griffin, and admirers Sally Barnes and Shannon Battisson. Picture: Sitthixay Ditthavong

You can't avoid Walter Burley Griffin. From the lake outwards, he's been lauded as the designer of Canberra.

But now his wife, who was half of the creative duo, is starting to receive her just recognition.

At a ceremony on the top of Mount Ainslie, the contribution of Marion Mahony Griffin was celebrated.

Her 150th birthday approaches on Sunday, with a string of events planned to honour her.

As America's first female professional architect, she ought to be famous. As an equal creator of Canberra, she ought to be better known.

So the participants in the mountain-top event felt.

"History is littered with women who are forgotten because the holder of the pen tells the story," Sally Barnes, the chief executive of the National Capital Authority, said.

Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin worked together as architects in Chicago and married in 1911.

When they entered the competition for a design of Canberra, it was his name on the application even though her watercolour conceptions of the yet-to-be-created city particularly impressed the judges.

Sally Barnes of the NCA wonders if the decision to put in the application in his name, and keep the woman architect's name off it, was because they feared Australian male chauvinism.

"Whether they thought that the colonials were too backward to accept a woman, we don't know," she said.

Either way, more than a century later, Marion Mahony Griffin is coming into the light she deserves. (Mahony, by the way, is pronounced with two syllables in Australia but three in the United States, according to Sally Barnes).

"She was very much a trail-blazer," Shannon Battisson, president of the ACT chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects, said at the event on the top of Mount Ainslie.

"She was very much a woman in a man's world."

By the end of her life in Chicago, she may have started to become resentful of her lack of full recognition, according to Sally Barnes.

She had been loathe to push herself forward. "It seems to have started with Marion herself," architect Shannon Battisson said.

"She was very quick to step back and to put Walter in the spotlight."

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