On October 11, 1957, the Australian parliament selected Canberra's design from an international competition that had closed six months earlier. The winning design was listed under the name of Walter Burley Griffin. The designer was Marion Mahony Griffin.

Marion Mahony was born in 1871 in Chicago. She was the second woman to graduate from MIT's architecture program, in 1894. She joined Frank Lloyd Wright's studio in Oak Park, Illinois, where she worked for fourteen years as the studio's chief draftsman — a designation that obscured that she was producing the visualization drawings that sold Wright's designs to clients. The atmospheric watercolor renderings that made Wright's early Prairie style comprehensible to the public were largely her work. Wright credited them to the studio. His name was on everything.

She married Walter Burley Griffin, a colleague from the studio, in 1911. The same year, they submitted a joint design to the international competition for Australia's new capital. The competition rules required the submission to be under a single name; they used Walter's. Their design won from 137 submissions.

The Australian government then spent years fighting with Walter over implementation, demanding changes, and eventually removing him from supervision of the project. Marion, who had done enormous portions of the design and visualization work, had no formal standing in the disputes because her name was not on the submission.

The Griffins subsequently built extensively in India, where Walter died in 1937. Marion returned to the United States and wrote her memoirs. She died in 1961.