When the orgy of the Food and Wine Frolic in Commonwealth Park coincided and overlapped with the nearby Birdman Rally at Regatta Point (as they did, for example, in 1987 when, probably, this startling undated aerial photograph was taken) crowds were thought to be of more than 100,000 souls.

And in 1988, with no extra attraction of the discontinued Birdman Rally, the Food and Wine Frolic alone was reported by the Canberra Times to have lured 100,000 frolicking orgy-goers. Even though Canberra's 2014 population is larger now than it was in the late 1980s, there are not the single gigantic, populist Canberra Day events, like the Frolic or the Rally, for massed Canberrans to find irresistible.

And, though all of us who ever went to a Birdman Rally miss it enormously, we might be too sophisticated in 2014 to rock along to anything so disgusting as the Food and Wine Frolic. It, the Frolic, may have been so popular because it did have such vulgar appeal to the appetites of Yuppie Canberrans. They looked to this reporter like chardonnay-hydrated First World pigs with their noses deep in troughs of quail, smoked salmon and pate.

Behaviour deteriorated as Frolic afternoons wore on. There were 38 arrests for various chardonnay-stoked atrocities at and around the 1987 Frolic. As a working reporter at an occasional Frolic, and so of course staying aloof from the gluttony and drunkenness, I found myself in the difficulty of being appalled by an event of which my employer, The Canberra Times, was a huge sponsor. It wasn't just the arrestable offences but well-heeled Canberrans' displays of extreme epicurean gluttony on a pate-packed afternoon. My inner socialist was appalled. The aftermath of a Frolic looked like what the battlefield of Agincourt would have looked like afterwards if Agincourt had been a food fight.

But Canberra Day has had gentler, sweeter manifestations.

Canberrans are usually a little repelled by their lake or can't think of anything that can be done with it, but the tagged carp fishing competitions of the 1970s, with a prize of $10,000 (a lot of money in these days, let alone in those days) if you somehow caught the fishy needle in a haystack, saw the lake fringed with fishers.

''But the big one got away,'' The Canberra Times reported after the mass-angling of March 12, 1978.

''By 4pm, the deadline, no sign had been seen of the elusive $10,000 carp with the black tag which had been released in the lake in front of Parliament House last Monday.''

Big, but approachable and folksy celebrities used to descend on the city for Canberra Day. There used to be a Moomba-like Canberra Day procession, with floats, and the undeniable star of the 1974 procession watched by 25,000, was Aunty Jack, then at the height of her fame. Kep Enderby, the member for Canberra, crowned Aunty Jack the Queen of Canberra. In what the Canberra Times called her ''coronation speech'' the mustachioed enforcer-goddess didn't threaten to rip the city's bloody arms off but did promise she would rename the city South Wollongong and turn it into a light industrial area. And on the float with her was a youthful Garry McDonald destined to be Wollongong's favourite son, Norman Gunston.

In 1977 another monarch took the throne when, without a hint of any of the cross-dressing that had characterised Aunty Jack's reign, Canberra's very own Alex Jesaulenko, the former VFL superstar, was made the King of Canberra. The Canberra Times counted 45,000 Canberrans attending the Canberra Day parade that preceded the great man's coronation, with 30,000 crammed along London Circuit alone.