Day 123

Day 123 Canberra

Plinth of stones

Parlimentary zone edge

Today we went to Old Parliament House. The building was erected back in the 1930’s as a temporary building and was replaced in 1988 with the new parliament house. We started by parking under the new Parliament House as the parking is free and we knew about it. We unloaded the Beast and then walked down the grassed area to the old building. On the way down there is this plinth there with all these old stones, you know the ones where His Hon laid this stone and so on, but they do not say what they belonged to so we assume that these were buildings that were demolished to make way for the new building (notice I am using new building instead of new Parliament House – saves on typing using

On our way to the old building

old Parlimentary Gardens

capitals!) and they could not throw them away so they remounted them here so family members can still see them I suppose because there is nothing on the plinth to say why they are here. It is still an impressive building, the old building, but is very dated. To get in I had to go under the front steps to a service entry that has a service lift platform to get me up to the ground floor area, but not the main entrance. The lady here was lovely and obviously loves her job and we chatted away. Whilst I was going up, she took Maureen off to show her were the next lift was and that they had a wedding happening at 3 and chat, chat, chat. They apparently do a number of weddings here and the courtyard gardens are perfect for it.

Maureen at the gardens

Wedding set out

We headed off into the building, the front areas look good but some of the back areas are looking a bit shabby and in need of attention, but the public do not see those, just the disabled. The building must have looked very grand in its time and was originally built to house 500 people. By the time it was replaced, it had 3,000 people there. The Prime Minister’s office is a little room with a warren of pokey little offices around it. You obviously did not do some of these jobs for the views, definitely for the prestige. The rooms are all wood panelled and the halls are a narrow, but the Beast managed without leaving too many marks of our passing. As we went through, we caught up with some of the wedding guests on a tour, I don’t know if they get one free as part of the wedding or not, be we caught up with one in the Senate room and listened in. The ministers used to get offices, but back benchers didn’t neither did the senators, so the original design of the desks in the big rooms had a wide desk and ink wells. The

Prime Ministers receptionist

Prime Ministers support staff area

idea was that they would use the desks as their work area so they did not get an office and they would stay in the rooms for the debates and stuff.

The two big rooms are pretty much as they left them and you can sit in the seats, but a few in each room have been glassed off and are the original seats and desks as they were built for heritage reasons. I loved the fact that when it was opened. The Parlimentary Heritage Group in England made the original Speakers Chair and it has wood from Westminster as well as from Nelson’s Victory in it. Then after the war when they were replacing their Speakers chair, they used our chair as the model and we made it out of Australian timber and gave it to them. So next time you see their parliament on TV you know their chair is younger than ours and it

Prime Ministers Office

Prime Ministers little Office

is Australian.

The building is very dated in its furnishings but does give off the air of elegance and power. It is a bit like when you go into the Weld Club in Perth as I did once upon a while ago, it has that feeling of age gone by and you do feel like you have stepped back 50 years in time. This is like that in that you do feel like you have stepped back in time. We would have more pictures but the camera ran out of battery. We wended our way through the displays until it was 5 and they shut down. The lovely lady showed us out and off we went. As we were leaving, the wedding guests were getting little show bags so we stood nearby hoping we might get one, but they said no – sad face.

We walked back up to the new building and back to Trude. We have obviously been in Canberra too long as we found our way out of town without the aid of a map and back to Girt. Once back we decided to go into Queanbeyan as they said they had some markets on, so in we went and there were 7 or 8 stalls, so done in no time.