There is some movement at the station among people who knew and loved Gary the garden-frequenting, big old grey kangaroo of Ainslie, to memorialise him in some way. He has just died after many years of giving much quiet delight to locals.
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In what were to be his twilight weeks this column (starting with a story of special kindness shown him in the heatwave) published Ainslie folk's fond photographs of him and stories about him. This columnist even has a fine and mystical painting of him, as the Eternal Kangaroo of Ainslie, by Cherylynn Holmes.
What if, your columnist suggests, any memorial to Gary in whatever form it takes (not necessarily a statue at all, although they can be superb, like this one in the Brisbane Botanical Gardens) mentions him but also says thank you to all the kangaroos any Canberrans ever see and appreciate as symbols of just how bushy our bush capital is? Kangaroo-blase now, we may have largely lost the naive, child-like ability to notice just how astonishing and lovely kangaroos are.
Not surprisingly, the best poem ever written about kangaroos was composed by a visiting Pommy, D.H. Lawrence, who in his three months in Australia in 1922, never lost the astonishment and wonder they stoked in him. When and if we do memorialise Gary and all our kangaroos, and do it with a memorial edifice, we could do much worse than attach a few lines from Lawrence's poem Kangaroo to it. It credits a half-tame kangaroo in his Thirroul garden with ''wonderful liquid eyes'' and ''a beautiful, slender face, oh! so much more gently and finely lined than a rabbit's or a hare's''.
Her sensitive, long, pure-bred face.
Her full antipodal eyes, so dark,
So big and quiet and remote,
Having watched so many empty dawns in silent Australia.
Yes, Gary's wonderful liquid eyes, full of insatiable wistfulness, were surely part of the charm he exerted among the folk of Ainslie.
Perhaps it is the astonished Pommy still lurking in this columnist that keeps me still kangaroo-appreciative. Just two mornings ago in the dawn light and while power-ambling towards Garran Oval, a big and ghostly kangaroo surged effortlessly towards me and then past me, en route to Red Hill, with amazing gracefulness, hardly making a sound, just giving me a quick glance with its wonderful liquid eyes.
Then, perhaps 200 metres away in the distance and on the Garran Oval, I saw a fine mob of 80 grey kangaroos grazing quietly in the moonlight. But this turned out to be, once I'd got closer, the plucky pre-dawn members of the suffering humans of an Original Bootcamp class, all wearing regulation kangaroo-grey T-shirts.
It was their quietness (save for the occasional low grunt and whimper of exertion) that had helped me mistake them for kangaroos (for footballers in training on an oval shout a lot).
''We're always very quiet at this time of the morning,'' their supervisor explained to me, ''so that we don't upset the locals.''
Yes, it pays to be wary of the silence-demanding locals of Garran, the Garran Taliban, for this is the suburb where (to the great embarrassment of the rest of us who live there) aggrieved locals have been known to petition their local MLAs in protest against the sound of the SouthCare helicopter delivering the dangerously ill to the Canberra Hospital.
Noisy Gang-gangs' lives remain a mystery
This recent action picture by David Flannery of two Gang-gang cockatoos in animated discussion is to remind readers of the part they can play in this year's Canberra Ornithologists Group (COG) Gang-Gang survey.
But the research into the Gang-gangs is taking on an added urgency with the chilling discovery that the ACT Liberals' environment spokeswoman Nicole Lawder is in favour of exterminating some protected native bird species if their calls upset her unmusical constituents.
Perhaps, when the Liberals are next in power our faunal emblem - the Gang-gang with its loud, creaking call - will quite literally be in the government's sights.
One of the big mysteries is that we know so little about where the birds we see in urban Canberra make their nests.
Do they perhaps make their home in hollow trees somewhere in the burbs and we just haven't spotted them or, are they nesting elsewhere in the ACT, in Namadgi National Park for instance, and simply bringing their youngsters to visit Canberra?
If the species does nest in the capital they are keeping very quiet about it and we have had no reports that this is the case.
But this suggestion has rung bells for one reader who remembered that there was a documented Gang-gang nest report from December 2009 when TAMS cut down the tall Eucalyptus viminalis tree in Campbell's Corroboree Park (on safety grounds), ''and had to call in the RSPCA to remove two GG nestlings from a nest in the ill-fated tree''.
And so the plot thickens, but if you have any information about the cockatoos or want to find out more about the Gang-gang, log into the Canberra Ornathologists Group website at canberrabirds.org.au where you will find plenty of information about how you can help with this year's the Gang-Gang survey.
