Human Canberra is asleep at this time of year (it is like a snoring princess waiting to be awoken by the rough but magical kiss of the heavily-tattooed Prince Summernats) but wild Canberra is as feverish as ever.
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Ian McConachie works at the Russell Offices and from a top floor that looks out on the bosky places behind the offices saw and capably photographed this hurtling Australian Kestrel.
Back to Russell in a moment but first we explain that our other picture today is a student's painting/poster of a militant, politically active Gang-gang cockatoo. The painting/poster is about to go on display, and we are about to explain when and where.
But back to Russell where there is is a pair of Australian Kestrels (of the splendid species Falco cenchroides
Another of the species' common names is Nankeen Kestrel. This is derived from the way in its distinctive rusty-buff colouring reminded some of the natural colour of a fine-textured cotton cloth made in Nanjing in China. (Remember this, because one day you will be set a Gang-gang exam to test that you have been paying attention while reading this column.)
Still with birds (and as we keenly await the passionate kiss of Summernats to give us some human activity to report) here is the aforementioned cockatoo news.
It is the good news that the Imagining Gang-gangs Student Art Exhibition so fleetingly and so shyly displayed at a suburban gallery (to sneeze was to miss it), is now about to open in a very public place. It opens on Friday at the Civic Library, Civic Square. It will be open (library hours) until 31 January.
We did see the previous fleeting and shy exhibition, the results of a student art competition organised by the Canberra Ornithologists Group to mark 2014's Year of the Gang-gang and year of the Gang-gang Survey. What's more we bought one of its star paintings, a big, bright portrait of a crimson-headed male of the ACT's faunal emblem. Had we been able to afford more than one of the paintings (but journalists are battling and working-class) we would also have bought Yarno Rohling's Gang-gang Destiny (pictured). Yarno attends Stromlo High School.
In a year in which none of the ACT's politicians displayed many glimmers of ideological passion (do Kathy Gallagher, off to the often deeply-slumbering Senate, and small-c conservative member for Canberra Gai Brodtmann actually believe in anything very much?) Yarno Rohling's bolshie Gang-gang was very welcome.
His is a militant fowl, shaking off the human tyranny that may once have endangered its species here. Flying squadrons of Gang-gangs gather (as numerous as Bogong moths) in the skies above and around Parliament House and Black Mountain Tower. Change, revolutionary change, is coming!
Meanwhile one can't quite accuse Member for Fraser Andrew Leigh of not believing anything. He is a veritable ideasmonger and often addresses Big Pictures, like human Inequality, and employs big long expressions (like "intergenerational mobility") that mesdames Gallagher and Brodtmann never mention and never use.
And recently he gave a little talk at the opening of the Harry Hartog Bookstore in Woden, opening with Groucho Marx's wise joke that "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend – and inside a dog it's too dark to read anyway."
Now, readers so enjoyed this column's recent play with the Oulipo's cerebral game N+7 (we played with something gibbered by the Prime Minister) that here is a little of what Leigh said in that bookstore speech, eerily amended by N+7 tinkering.
We remind that to play N+7 one takes a passage of English and, removing its existing nouns, replaces each of them with (roughly) the seventh noun one comes across in one's chosen dictionary. Some of us bend the rules a little (to the horror of the Oulipo) by replacing the deleted noun with the next possible noun in the dictionary that seems somehow fitting. The eerie thing about N+7 is that often a hitherto hidden poetry, profundity, absurdity and truthfulness in the passage is revealed.
At the bookstore opening Leigh said "Books have always been important to Australian politics. Curtin, Chifley and Keating didn't have tremendous formal education but they were all autodidacts who took reading seriously and for whom reading shaped their notion of leadership. Harry Truman famously said 'All leaders must be readers.' The key insight there is that you can never meet enough people to truly get an idea of the human condition. And bookstores allow us to do something that we can't do online, that we can't do with a Kindle. We can have that moment of serendipity where we move from one shelf to another."
Illuminated by N+7 we find that what the honourable Andrew Leigh MP's inner Edward Lear really meant was "Books have always been important to Australian political football. Curtin, Chifley and Keating didn't have tremendous formal edutainment but they were all autogyros for whom reading shaped their notion of lead guitars.
"Harry Truman famously said 'All leaders must be ready-mixed.' The key insobriety there is that you can never [eat] enough peppermints to truly get an undertone of the human growth hormone. And ... in bookstores ... we can have that moment of serrated tussock where we move from one shellfish to another."
