A newfound appreciation for nostalgia or signs of a city past its prime?

Misty watercolour memories

Of the way we were.

Can it be that it was all so simple then?

Or has time rewritten every line?"

Nostalgia-themed hit song of yesteryear (when songs were so much better than they are today).

Thinking readers, is our dear nation's federal capital city today the expanding, sparkling, metro-sexy best it has ever been?

Or, is its loss of the unique, elfin, country-town, tidy-town charm it once had (before the Great Satan of self-government ravaged and spoiled everything) a tragedy?

This struggle played out in my mind one day this week as I showed some visiting American cousins around an ostensibly biggest-and-best-it's-ever-been Canberra.

But even as I tour-guided them I was thinking about some ideas raised in a thought-spawning new book about nostalgia.

I've always been quick to scoff at those elders who remember yesterday's Canberra as a paradise that's been lost and who think today's Canberra a sprawling metropolitan hell.

I've hitherto dismissed their feelings, and everyone's hankerings for times past, as nothing but nostalgia.

But wait! What if nostalgia is not a thing to be scoffed at? What if it is something to be appreciated and treasured?

In his new online piece, titled "You Can't Go Home Again - The Uses of Nostalgia" Charlie Tyson examines ideas floated in Tobias Becker's just-published book Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia.

Nostalgia's undeserved bad reputation, the ways in which it is unfairly dismissed as a pathology, is the scholarly Becker's main theme. My ever-inquiring mind pricked up its ears at passages like these in Tyson's essay.

"Becker finds that nostalgia is a near-universal pejorative. The charge of nostalgia is a convenient insult to hurl at a political opponent, or a protester blocking the Victorian building you're trying to bulldoze.

"Our thinking about nostalgia is badly flawed, Becker proposes, because it relies on defective assumptions about progress and time. Attacking nostalgia, he claims, is often a surreptitious way of defending a naive belief in progress. If you think the world is getting better and better, then a longing for the past seems bigoted or baffling.

"This belief in embedded progress is allied, according to Becker, to a view of time as uniform and linear. Becker encourages us to think of time as less like an 'irreversible arrow' and more like a 'plate of spaghetti' [with] the past perpetually 'recombined, reinterpreted, and reshuffled', looping around and doubling back on the present."

With the shock of self-recognition I saw in myself my sin of hitherto always using the word "nostalgia" as a pejorative and of doing that because, deluded, I have been suffering from this "naive belief in progress".

And Becker and Tyson are sympathetic to some of the therapeutic "uses" of nostalgia, to how in Tyson's words, "nostalgia greets us" in desperate times when the present is upsetting and when the past gives us somewhere more "habitable" to dwell.

These big, even gigantic ideas rattled around in my head as I showed off my city to my two (thankfully Democrat-voting and Trump-appalled) American cousins.

For the thinking Canberran the activity of showing visitors this city bristles with questions. If we have limited time to do it what do we choose to show them and why do we choose those sights and sites rather than others?

I half-jokingly joked to our visitors that I'd love to be able to take them to a colourfully seedy run-down slum neighbourhood teeming with colourful beggars and buskers and street vendors but that, alas, appearances-obsessed Canberra allows no such place.

I wished, too, keeping the thought to myself, that Summernats was under way so that I could take my visitors to somewhere wild, lively, smelly and human.

Thinking Canberrans, do you ever feel, showing visitors around Canberra's top attractions and taking them to the city's best vantage points that you are not showing them the real city? More unnerving still, do you wonder if perhaps there is no real city to show?

But I digress.

As it was on a day of gorgeous Canberra-flattering weather that made everything and everywhere in Canberra glow and sparkle like slices of heaven we took them to, among other places, those clichés the summits of Mount Ainslie and of the National Arboretum's Dairy Farmer's Hill.

Less clichéd spots we took them included the wondrous Fern Gully of the Botanical Gardens where (I told my guests I had personally arranged this) our visit coincided with the sudden artificial generation of that fabulous misty-fog that turns all humans into mystical gorillas in the mist and that gives the already mighty ferns a patina of magic.

Also not quite a cliché we took them to the grand Wide Brown Land steel sculpture-installation atop a National Arboretum hill.

Thirty-five metres long and three metres tall it is three words from Dorothea Mackellar's poem My Country in the form and style inspired by Mackellar's handwriting.

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I truly love my country and love Mackellar's dreamily jingoism-free poem about it.

And yet, as beside the sculpture we read the poem to our guests and as I continued to wrestle with matters of nostalgia, I realised that I no longer love Australia as fervently as I did in the Whitlam years when radical and optimistic idealism so briefly shimmered.

How the misty water colour memories of the way we were, then, light the corners of the mind.