Returning to The Canberra Times to write Gang-gang, IAN WARDEN reflects on the history of the long-running column
T
he endearing Gang-gang cockatoo with its call suggestive of the creaking of unoiled door hinges of outback sheds (and during his prime ministership, of the dinky-di voice of Bob Hawke) has been the ACT's official faunal emblem since February 1997.
But the species was taken to Canberrans' hearts long before that. Back in the mid-1960s The Canberra Times honoured this distinctive Canberra native by naming a popular newspaper column after it.
The Gang-gang column was always decorated with a picture of the bird (for some part of the 1970s it was portrayed peering down at Canberra life, stickybeaking really, through a telescope). Over the years this paper's Gang-gang column has, rather like any bird species, mysteriously come and gone and waxed and waned. But it has never become locally extinct and now, with conditions favouring it, it is multiplying healthily and from Monday will appear five days a week, from Monday to Friday.
Gang-gangs were surely first chosen for a column's title because they have such a strong association with Canberra. It's an unusual and unlucky Canberran who never sees them and who lives out of earshot of them. They're widely distributed across Victoria and NSW but Canberra is, really, the only Australian city with a conspicuous, city-wide population of them.
That they're so approachable and set us such a strong moral example by being monogamous for life (wherever you see them the adult male and adult female are never far apart) is part of what makes them endearing. Then too their presence here says something flattering about our fauna-friendliness as citizens and about what a bushy green oasis our city is. Then, too, and though we really shouldn't be so anthropomorphic, their creaky-voiced conversations with one another may suggest animated gossip in this most gossip-loving and gossip-driven of cities. After a period of moulting the Gang-gang column begins anew, in new plumage, on Monday. With our city becoming a more diverse and many-splendoured metropolis by the minute and with our centenary looming, the Gang-gang column wants to try and help celebrate whatever is fascinating about the city's past, present and future. Please think of this column and its omnivorous appetite (appropriate because Gang-gangs dine on a great range of native and introduced seeds, fruits, nuts and insects and their larvae) whenever you know of anything going on, especially if it is of a slightly esoteric nature that might not normally get a guernsey on this paper's profoundly important news pages.
You can contact Ian Warden by email at gang-gang@canberratimes.com.au or telephone 6280-2261.
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