Point Misery mystery deepens

Fanatically loyal readers will know that this column has been running an occasional series in a (quite successful) search of how and why evocatively named Misery Point and Misery Hill, soon to be embraced by the new suburbs of the Molonglo Valley development, came by their melancholy 19th-century names.

Elizabeth Burness, curator of the Tuggeranong Schoolhouse Museum (the schoolhouse was built in 1880), has been following that saga. Now she muses that people who are ''sensitive to ghosts'' should probably think twice about going to live anywhere in the Misery Point district.

''In his Tales and Legends of Canberra Pioneers Samuel Shumack tells the story of the mysterious disappearance of an old man named Develin, who was looking after Arthur Webb's property near Misery Point. Webb took up a selection near Misery Point about 1866 but after the disappearance of Develin, he sold out to Augustus Gibbes, of Yarralumla,'' she said.

''A couple of years later, Thomas Southwell, the ancestor of many of the vast Southwell clan, found Develin's remains, with a pair of boots sticking out of a hollow log. The log was two miles from Webb's house, a long way from where Develin was meant to be. The mystery of his death was never solved.

''In 1907 Christopher Donnelly, known as Christy, pitched his tent near the spring at a place called 'Crow's Nest'. After supper, he saw an old man with a long beard coming up the gully. Christy looked for somewhere for him to sit and when he looked up, the visitor had disappeared. A couple of nights later he again saw the same person and kept watching him as he approached. When he got near he seemed to sink into the ground.

''When Sam Shumack suggested he speak to the apparition if he saw it again, Christy preferred to shift his camp 1½ miles away, even though it meant he had to carry water a mile, rather than meet Develin again.''

Yes, what if you move to that neighbourhood and find that on your walk to and from the shops for some milk and a packet of Lolly Gobble Bliss Bombs you have to take a detour of a mile and a half to avoid Develin's ghost?

Debate about the koel (the Australian native bird the ACT Liberals' environment spokeswoman wants eradicated, or, like asylum seekers, stopped at our borders and sent back where they came from), continues to call, penetratingly, from the Letters to the Editorial pages.

This koel-championing columnist too, is receiving correspondence about it. Some who want the bird eradicated are not even able to rise to the intellectual challenge of spelling its four-letter name properly, but perhaps it is spellingist of me to even mention that.

Those who think there are moral grounds for eradicating the koel because, a cuckoo, it lays its eggs in the nests of other species, will enjoy this 1937 analysis of why the female and male (operating as a team, a kind of Bonnie and Clyde) have such different plumage. In his book on birds, Lieutenant Colonel D.D. Cunningham writes: ''The differences in the plumage of cock and hen [koel] leave no room for doubt as to the part each sex plays in accomplishing their felonious purpose.

''The shining black plumage and bright red eyes of the male, and its insistent and distracting call, are specially adapted to attract attention in the sites he chooses to call from, while the subdued greenish-grey tints and white spots and bars of the feathering of the female serve to make her almost invisible among the broken lights and shades of the coverts in which she lurks awaiting a chance for depositing her eggs in some other bird's nest.''

Botanically bewildered as they must be to find themselves in Canberra, lots of the plants of the new Red Centre Garden at the Australian National Botanic Gardens are bursting into flower. Here, photographed on Monday, is a gaily-flowering Sturt's desert rose, the floral emblem of the Northern Territory, but adapting well to life in this very different territory.

The Red Centre Garden is a thing to go ''Gosh!'' at (this columnist rattles on about it a lot because it is so very strange and adds to our city's metrosexy weirdness and diversity) and at the gardens' website you'll find details of a special opportunity coming up for you to go and give it your first ''Gosh!''

For four nights, the first of them on February 28, and as an after-dark part of the Enlighten Festival, the gardens is illuminating both the famous Rainforest Gully and the new Red Centre Garden for a Rainforest To Desert ''night-time guided journey''.

Of course, there are bunyips in the gully but they are shy and will probably make themselves scarce till it's all over. You can read all about Rainforest To Desert and buy tickets for it at anbg.gov.au/gardens.