Old Parliament House was never meant to last. Designed by the Commonwealth's chief architect John Smith Murdoch - who privately thought the whole project a waste of money - it was officially "provisional," intended to serve for a maximum of fifty years until something grander could be raised. Murdoch worked in a restrained Stripped Classical style: no columns, no pediments, just the orderliness and symmetry of those forms reduced to their bones. Construction began in 1923 and the building effectively doubled the population of the tiny, dispersed town of Canberra. The workers and their families lived in camps, enduring the capital's harsh weather. The final cost ran to about £600,000 - more than three times the original estimate, a fitting overture for a parliament.

Inside, the building speaks in colour and timber. At its centre is King's Hall, lit from above through clerestory windows, its floor laid in jarrah and silver ash, dominated by a bronze statue of King George V. To one side lies the Senate, draped in the deep red of the upper house in the Westminster tradition; to the other, the House of Representatives in House of Commons green. The chambers are panelled in Australian black bean and Tasmanian blackwood, and the carpets are woven with patterns of eucalyptus leaves and wattle. The Speaker's Chair is a copy of the one in the British Commons - and when an air raid destroyed the London original in the Second World War, Australia gave Britain a replacement carved from this very design.

For sixty-one years, the nation's defining moments unfolded in these rooms. Australia declared war on Germany and Japan here. Prime Ministers John Curtin and Ben Chifley lay in state in King's Hall. And on 11 November 1975 came the most extraordinary scene of all: after the Governor-General dismissed the Whitlam government, an official read the proclamation of Parliament's dissolution from the front steps. Gough Whitlam, deposed, turned to the crowd and delivered a line now burned into the country's memory - "Well may we say God save the Queen, because nothing will save the Governor-General." The steps of this modest building had become the stage for a constitutional crisis that Australians still argue about today.

By the 1980s the provisional building was bursting and worn, and Parliament finally moved to its permanent home on Capital Hill in 1988. The question then was whether to demolish it. Walter Burley Griffin himself had objected to its placement decades earlier, complaining it blocked the grand vista and was like "filling the front yard with outhouses." But its weight in the nation's history won out, and in 2009 it reopened as the Museum of Australian Democracy. The story is not always gentle. In December 2021 the historic front doors were badly burned in fires lit during protests - condemned by the very Tent Embassy whose name the protesters had invoked - and repairs ran past 5.3 million dollars. The building endures, scorched and restored, still telling the messy story of how a country governs itself.