The Burns Memorial was erected in 1935, on the corner of Canberra Avenue and National Circuit. It is the second oldest public sculpture in Canberra (after Bellona), and the first to have a permanent location. For many years it was a landmark used to orient visitors negotiating the unfamiliar layout of Forrest streets.

It is the eighth and last Burns memorial erected in Australia. Burns memorials symbolise the loyalty and affection of Scots for the poet Robert Burns and for expatriate Scots communities worldwide they are also monuments to Scottishness, Scots traditions and achievements in adopted countries.

The memorial was designed by Sydney architects, J Shedden Adam and incorporates the statue designed by John Swan Davie. The memorial borrows heavily from the Scottish-American War Memorial in Edinburgh, and depicts a contemplative Burns in front of a pink granite wall, on which are four panels showing scenes and a verse from Burns’s poems – ‘John Anderson My Jo’, ‘To a Mouse’, ‘Tam O’Shanter’ and ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’. The statue and panels were cast in Italy in 1934.

The memorial was the first major project of the Canberra Highland Society and Burns Club, formed in October 1924. In April 1927 the Club proposed building a much-needed memorial hall and adding a statue, but at a national Conference of Australian Scots in October the priorities were reversed. James Murdoch, a retailer, politician and philanthropist from Sydney, and an active member of both the Highland Society of NSW and the Australian Federal Capital League, was appointed chairman of the Canberra Burns Memorial Fund committee. Within the year, the Depression had struck and funds were very slow coming in.

Three sites were proposed: near the current Academy of Science in Edinburgh Avenue, in the Parliamentary Triangle, or the Forrest site. The Club favoured the Forrest site as it was near both the Presbyterian Church of St Andrew and the rowan tree planted on 11 September 1926. The rowan tree was the site of Burns Anniversary Day ceremonies in Canberra.

Murdoch unveiled the memorial on 26 January 1935 and presented it to the nation through Prior Prime Minister Joseph Lyons. A special train brought 300 interstate visitors, including the Dulwich Hill Pipe Band which played at the ceremony. A dinner was held at the Albert Hall, with the ceremonial elements broadcast nationally by radio.

The memorial occupies its own block of land. The Club’s lease of the adjacent block held a condition that all rights and obligations over the statue site be relinquished to the Commonwealth. When the Club prepared to move to Kambah in 1990, the Land Titles Office discovered that no title to the memorial’s block had ever been issued, making it the only such block in the ACT.

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