Old Parliament House Reveals Hidden Secrets

Recently Old Parliament House not only opened its doors, but its walls to the public with its Scaffolding Tours, part of the 2014 Canberra Heritage Festival. After 61 years of it being home to the head honchos of Australian democracy, recent renovations have peeled back the layers of this iconic building, revealing hidden secrets, which were on display for a lucky few.

For someone who has only ventured into the halls of Old Parliament House as a primary school student, being ushered around rooms with red velvet rope barriers, this tour allowed for a more ‘hands-on’ approach to the building’s political history. The tour scaled the façade of the building, which was designed to host the provisional parliament for 50 years.

Wearing hard hats, high visibility vests, safety goggles, gloves and booties, the Museum of Australian Democracy heritage manager Edwina Jans led the group of 16 through the bones of the building to the top landing of the House of Representatives.

“The project, is a paint and render upgrade to remove lead based paint [from the façade] and replace it with a breathable paint,” she said.

The facelift peeled back 80 years worth of paint, render and crack repairs, which gave rise to physical evidence of the stories that have been passed on through the history books and hidden secrets yet to be told.

“Sometimes we know things and we are looking for the physical evidence of it and other times, like the timber plugs, we didn’t know anything about it,” said Ms Jans.

“We discovered there had been an opening on the main floor level, opening out to what was called the annex. So that no longer exists and that opening had been bricked up and a window had been put in, so you couldn’t actually see it, but by taking the render off and the paint we could then see there was a much larger opening,”

The upgrade reflected the social changes in the Australian culture during its 61 year political occupancy.

“There were no female toilets for members [until 1943], although there were plenty of toilets out here because the only women basically on site at the time were in the kitchen or were secretaries.”

Each of the four tours led during The Heritage Festival took a different route through the construction site, with the tours being guided around the on-going work.

The renovations which began in 2010 to restore this heritage listed building are scheduled for completion in 2015. With that, the history and stories told within Old Parliaments walls will be once again enclosed.

“It’s a terrific privilege for us to be able to share this with visitors because we really enjoyed the processes of going over the years of learning about the secrets and things that were hidden being revealed,” said Ms Jans. “Although it will all be covered over again once work is complete.”

Due to its popularity during the Heritage Festival, the Museum hopes to reintroduce these tours outside of the festival until work on the façade ceases next year.

Text and images by Alkira Reinfrank