While the beautiful marbles of the Parliament House foyer always draw attention, it is the mighty Eugowra granite on which the place is really built.
National Rock Garden Trust director Mike Smith said almost 23,000 individual slabs of Eugowra granite were used to clad the curved exterior walls of Parliament House.
"The most important rock in Parliament House is that rock," Mr Smith, a retired geologist, said.
And now there is more.
A nearly nine-tonne slab of the granite was delivered from Eugowra, a town in the central west of NSW, to Canberra on Friday.
The slab will to remain in storage and, it's hoped, take pride of place in a National Rock Garden, which is being proposed for Canberra, but still subject to several approvals.
Shelley Norrie, from Eugowra Events and Tourism Association, accompanied the piece of granite to Canberra, and said the granite, a mix of black, white and translucent minerals, caught the eye of Parliament House architect Aldo Giurgola during a visit to the town.
Giurgola literally tripped over a piece of the granite while visiting the Eugowra property of another architect, John Andrews, and decided it would be a perfect for the exterior walls of Parliament House.
"There was also a block of it under a dripping tap and that's how he saw the colour," Mrs Norrie said.
Mr Smith said there was a small National Rock Garden off Lady Denman Drive, but there was a push to create a bigger display, to celebrate the geological heritage of Australia and become another place to visit, especially for school children on excursions to Canberra. It was likely to be at the National Arboretum, but nothing has yet been decided.
The slab was donated by the local granite mill at Eugowra. It was a generous gesture from a little town still reeling from a freak storm last month.
Eugowra was devastated on the morning of November 14 by a flash flood that has been variously described as a "wall of water" and "inland tsunami".
Mrs Norrie said there was little left in the town. Even its famous murals had been destroyed. Two people tragically died.
She said the flash flood had not been associated with releases from the Wyangala Dam, but was the result of a ferocious storm.
"Thirty houses have been condemned, there was about 130 that have been damaged. People are still living in emergency accommodation," she said.
"Lots of people in Eugowra have not only lost their homes, but businesses as well.
"It was a freak storm. Everything was full, all the creeks were full and, in some places, we had up to 200mm of water and it had nowhere to go. There were just two walls of water from the creeks coming."
Mrs Norrie said before the flood, the Eugowra Events and Tourism Association had been working to promote its association with Parliament House and pique the interest of tourists who might come to visit the town. The donation of the slab had been part of that.
Now, the town was struggling to survive.
