One endeavour, above all others, will be obsessing columnist ROBERT MACKLIN in 2023 – a book full of surprises for Canberrans and, he hopes, for a wider readership – on the real story of the men (and one woman) who laid the foundations for our National Capital.

THE biggest surprise of my book, I suspect, will be the extraordinary contribution of someone who barely figures in Canberra’s official history.

The working title sets the scene. We’ve dubbed it, “Charles Weston’s Dream City” – “poet, artist and tree planter” after the phrasing in his obituary by the “Sydney Morning Herald’s” horticultural editor, John Gilmour Lockley. 

I say “we” because I am working with Dr John Gray who, in his retirement from the NCDC, completed his Doctor of Environmental Design thesis in 1999, a massive research effort on Weston’s life and work. And while it will be a central element of the narrative, the book will also bring his extraordinary achievement into the wider context of the British Imperial era – and the young Australian Federation in which it took place.

Already, at this early research stage, it includes a cast of extraordinary characters from the worlds of science, religion, politics, architecture, officialdom, treasure hunters, royalty and even an appalling mountebank (and the woman is, of course, Marion Mahony Griffin, whose brilliant work with her husband Walter might well have been the key to the winning Griffin design).

Weston, an international arboreal and horticultural virtuoso, according to former NCDC commissioner Malcolm Latham was “the man who breathed life into Griffin’s design for Canberra”. 

Lockley, went further: “It was Mr Weston who made Canberra the dream city she is today. His message to the nation, his melodies, his pictures, he pieced together with limb and leaf. 

“Others did the planning and building leaving their finished work for time to discolour and perhaps to spoil. But Mr Weston set the growing beauty of Australian and exotic trees in places where old Mother Earth would guard and guide them. 

“This is not the place to tell of how the magnificent work was done. That story can be told another day.” 

With a bit of luck – and lots of late nights – that day will come in 2023. 

Weston’s remarkable contribution – the experimentation, selection and planting of many millions of trees and shrubs – is virtually missing from Canberra’s public chronicle. 

Many think the suburb and district of Weston and Weston Creek respectively were named in his honour. Not so. Even some of the official government publications wrongly identify the “other” Weston who, it turns out, was a NSW Corps soldier and amateur illustrator, said to have published the first rendering of a didgeridoo. That might account for the oddity of the suburb’s streets being named after Australian artists. 

Weston Park is Charles’ only separate memorial. Walter and Marion Griffin provided the framework brilliantly, but it was upon their latticed canvas that Weston drew foliage from all the continents but Antarctica to give life to the Griffin concept. 

And though he was no futurist, the astonishing range of species he experimented and selected in his millions of plantings, provided a “fortress of foliage” for Canberra in the struggle against climate change. While Sydney and Melbourne face the loss of up to 90 per cent of their limited range of protective trees, Weston’s “green draperies” will survive the coming arboreal pandemic. 

If, for no other, that’s reason aplenty to tell the amazing inside story of a humble, but dedicated hero of our beauteous National Capital.

robert@robertmacklin.com