Canberra Hospital's towering power couple

These are not the cranes' official names. Urchins of the local primary school, their school (like my home) almost literally in the shadow of the cranes, were invited to give these towering neighbours names. And so now the cranes are officially and respectively called Lightning McCrane and Cranosaurus.

Those are fine names but for my own personal relationship with the cranes (I am affectionately fond of them, for reasons I will explain) I chose to think of names that would humanise them and would characterise them as a male/female couple.

The mind went to some of the great and famous man and woman combinations of history, to Samson and Delilah, to Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinksy, to Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy, to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, to Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, to John and Yoko, to movie couples like Sandy and Danny of Grease and Ilsa and Rick of Casablanca, and so on.

But I rejected all of these options; sometimes on obvious moral grounds since some of those aforementioned relationships were blush-makingly tainted by adultery.

I settled on Gough and Margaret (they pipped Walter and Marion, the great American imaginers of our federal capital city, at the post) in part because the Whitlams were blameless and beloved Australians. It was patriotically important that the Australian cranes, building something significant in Australia's federal capital city, have Australians' names.

As well (how witty of me) Gough and Margaret were both toweringly tall and large (and hard-workingly useful) just like the hospital's tower cranes.

I wouldn't normally write a column about goings-on in my suburban backyard (for this column is famous for its Big Pictures, for its addressing of matters of great social and political import) but as well as the hospital's expansion being of whole-of-city importance, there is something about this Canberra and these cranes that seems significant.

I'm not sure what that something is, but perhaps wrestling with it for a few paragraphs (for the unexamined life is not worth living) will tease it out.

The presence of the cranes strangely improves and enhances the whole swathe of suburbia in the hospital's neighbourhood. It is no wonder that schoolchildren (and even local seniors like this columnist) find the cranes so wondrously exciting and endearing that they want to give them names.

Life's better with cranes like these, and when the cranes' work is done and if they are removed (but I am already organising a petition calling for them to stay, to be installed for perpetuity, as the giant kinetic sculptures that they are) the neighbourhood will be somehow shrivelled and impoverished.

But why is this so? How and why do the cranes work this magic?

The dear cranes themselves seem to be trying to help me with this project because they are here beside me, dominating (and enriching) the view from the window of my study in which on a Wednesday morning I am hammering out this column.

Working busily, mightily, majestically (their swirls and bows to and fro and up and down and all framed by a cloudlessly blue sky suggest a kind of ballet) they are such a visual distraction that this column is taking forever to write.

Then, spectacularly, entertainingly busy by day, they are a similarly neighbourhood-transforming presence at night.

Then, decorated with bright, aviation-alerting lights, they illuminate the whole next-to-the-hospital neighbourhood so that it is never truly dark. An insomniac, at night (listening to the Boobook owls hooting dolefully to one another about things important to them) I can admire the cranes' lightshow through my bedroom window.

Perhaps it is this virtual nightlessness created by the cranes' illuminations that is making the owls, nocturnal creatures, so doleful.

What's so pleasing about them, methinks, is that (especially by day when they are busy) they are making this usually desperately uneventful and unchanging swathe of suburbia (other than actual sepulchres, is there anything more sepulchral than an established Canberra suburb?) excitingly eventful.

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And for those of us who wish neat, quiet, ruthlessly orderly and civically tamed Canberra had more of the qualities of a real city (bustle, noises, sudden smells, changes, surprises, encounters with eccentric people and eccentric structures, thrills, disarray, everything) there is something of a real city's metropolitan furniture about giant cranes. Their presences are exciting proofs of restless energetic building, transforming and loading underway.

"There is change going on here! Newness is coming!" tall cranes proclaim.

When one approaches a city or a part of a city and its skyline is bristling with cranes, that skyline, that vista, effervescing with metropolitan life, is exhilarating in the extreme. And perhaps, subconsciously, I only considered famous member of famous heterosexual couples for names for the two hospital cranes because I want to think of the two cranes as a breeding pair, reproducing themselves so that the city soon bristles with cranes.

Cranes do furnish a true city, and Gough and Margaret are lending this usually dull neighbourhood, in this mostly sepulchre-uneventful town, an amygdala-tickling feel of a true city.

Usually sleepy, politically inactive, insular, bourgeois neighbours of the Canberra Hospital, gird up your loins! Get ready to fight to keep our cranes still with us (becoming mighty works of public art, kinetic sculptures) even after they've finished their noble work of expanding a hospital.

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