This mural by Christopher Paul Toth shows Walter Burley Griffin (1876-1937) and his wife Marion Mahony Griffin (1871-1961) both architects, who met in the office of Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s most famous architect, and some years later won the international competition to design Canberra in 1912. Marion presented the design in a series of very beautiful drawings showing a capital city nestled into the hills and valleys of Canberra. These drawings, stylised here, are listed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World 1 and exemplify the national capital city in the national interest.

This building known as the Woolstore is the final piece of the Kingsborough Village. The Village includes several commissioned art works and this large work was completed over the 2019/2020 summer in thick smoke haze and scorching temperatures between fires and hail storms and before Covid 19 arrived on our shores. The Woolstore was completed and began to be occupied in October 2020.

The mural location is significant being located on the corner of The Causeway and Cunningham Streets Kingston, two streets planned by the Griffins over a century before the art work was created. You will note on the Mural how the planned Causeway Avenue heads directly north to terminate with Mt Ainslie like many of Canberra’s spectacular avenues designed by this couple who have had such a major impact on the National Capital and how its people live here.

If you look closely at the artwork you can see the Kingsborough site overlaid in gold leaf by the artist.

The neighbourhood was originally a low cost residential estate to house the workers in the earliest stages of Canberra’s development. The Causeway is so named because the road crossed the Molonglo River linking north and south Canberra until Lake Burley Griffin was filled in 1964 and named in honour of the City’s and the Lake’s designers.

Walter Burley Griffin Society