Sure enough, the three bottoms in Sam Townsend's Blue Boys of the Murrumbidgee have just followed us around the Canberra Community Art Space where the work was shown.

Townsend's evocative Blue Boys of the Murrumbidgee is his digital treatment (among other things giving it its blueness) of a photograph he found in one of his late grandfather's photo albums. One of the three blue boys (the one on the far right) is his grandfather and he turns out to be a rather famous Canberran known to thousands of us who have lived here for yonks (although few of us ever saw him like this). It is Alan Browning, clerk in the House of Representatives from 1985 to 1991, and a considerable local tennis player known to all mature-age ACT players.

The three blue boys (the others are ''Keith'' and ''Tony'', although it's not clear which is which) are at the Murrumbidgee at Kambah Pool one hot summer day, perhaps in the 1950s.

Townsend says that everyone's first impression is that three boys have been caught in a spontaneous moment as they prepare to leap into the river. But he sometimes wonders if the picture hasn't been rather carefully posed. The arrangement of the three figures is suspiciously elegant and arty and without their posing, staying still, it would have been difficult for a camera of the day to capture the trio so perfectly.

Canberra historian Lenore Coltheart has made the poignant discovery, fossicking at the Archives, of 1944 plans that imagine Canberra's precious but exasperating Albert Hall enlarged, extended and facility-enriched. Alas, these dreams were never acted upon.

The dear old hall (opened in 1928) is exasperating, she reminds us, because the premises are so small and lacking in facilities. So for example there is no room at all behind the pokey little stage for any of the things bold stage productions really need.

Then, Coltheart laments, the hall has no kitchen, which seriously limits the sorts of functions that can be held there. And there is no true dining room or supper room. Other horrors, caused by the cramped circumstances, include the way in which there is no proper place to store the hall's chairs so that when they're cleared away to make the floor of the hall spacious they have to be put in the lecture room, a space that really should be available for better things.

It's not that Coltheart doesn't love the hall (she adores it and is probably Canberra's foremost authority on its every foible and nuance) but her discovery of the 1940s' dreams makes her wistful about what might have been.

What happened, she explains, is that the hall was built for infant Canberra in belt-tightening times when there was just £25,000 to spare. By the 1940s, with the Department of the Interior having visions of post-war reconstruction and with Canberra's population growing, there was realisation that if this was to be the City Hall to meet the needs of a city teeming with folk then it had to be bigger and better. The Department of the Interior's Douglas McCalman created the plans she found.

McCalman's east elevation in those papers (the view we get today from Commonwealth Avenue of the front of the hall) shows a parallel building, a New Supper Hall (with a nice big kitchen and scullery), standing beside the existing 1928 hall and linked with it by an open courtyard. The plans show the extended complex bristling with new rooms and facilities.

On Monday between 2pm and 4pm there's going to be a poignant occasion at the hall.

''People are invited to help create the Albert Hall we could have had,'' Coltheart says, ''a 'living blueprint' of the gorgeous 1940s design for an Albert Hall. ''The aim is to have enough people to hold a continuous ribbon to form the outlines of the building we should have had.''