Scriveners Camp
This location, near the site of the Capital's early surveyors' camp, is a good place to think about the thousands of workers who built the new Capital out of its isolated bush beginnings.
With no housing available, the workers who came to Canberra lived through the extremes of summer and winter in tented camps. Several labour camps were located nearby on Capital Hill, close to the major work sites of Parliament House and Hotel Canberra (previously well known as Ainslie Hotel, Olims and now the modern Mercure).
By 1927, most of the tented camps across Canberra were replaced by simple huts, with many evolving into hostels. The Hillside Hostel, built nearby on Capital Hill, housed the post-war migrant tradesmen who found work in Canberra in the 1940s. Once a familiar part of the landscape, the Capital Hill camps disappeared in the 1960s.
Canberra's designed landscape
This section of the trail passes through Canberra's most significant designed landscape – the sweeping vista linking the Australian War Memorial to Parliament House.
In recent decades, the Australian War Memorial and Parliament House have become defining elements of the city's grand land axis. Walter Burley Griffin, in his original 1912 plan, imagined the central national area as a space symbolising the democratic relationship between the Australian people, their government and their capital city.
Over the last 100 years, Australia's key national institutions have been constructed within this carefully designed and highly symbolic space, though not in the positions that Griffin had envisioned them being placed. The monuments, mounds and walkways within the vista commemorate important national events, issues and individuals, including war and reconciliation.
