LAUSR

ABSTRACT The Chicago architect/planner Walter Burley Griffin (1876–1937) is known world-wide for his plan for Canberra, Australia’s national capital. Working with his life and professional partner Marion Mahony, he was also responsible for a series of suburban and smaller town schemes in the US and Australia from 1913 until the late 1920s. Most of his Australian designs were embedded in larger processes of speculative land development. The Milleara Estate, commissioned by the little-known developer Henry Scott in 1925, was laid out and available for sale across what are now known as the Melbourne suburbs of Keilor East and Avondale Heights in early 1927 well in advance of the true wave of development of that suburban region. This paper traces the initial impetus for the estate as a ‘garden city’ and its execution and sale with use of the Griffin name and ethos. While Griffin’s association faded during a period of stagnation, it was evoked nearly thirty years later to contest a government plan to completely re-design the estate.