At first glance you might make the understandable mistake of thinking

The painting Super Red Head - Bad Hair/Bad Feather Day

This impressionistic little masterpiece is part of the Imagining Gang-gangs school student art show that continues at the M16 Artspace in Griffith until Sunday. The artist is very young, but he has made a very canny capture of the Gang-gang because as we were just noticing only the other day, watching a pair of Gang-gangs canoodling on a low branch in our street, Gang-gang plumage can look as much like fleece as feathers. A breeze was ruffling the lovers and they looked positively fluffy and hairy.

Taking a second look at Kieran Orrell's digital photograph you notice that the everyday gentlemen in Civic have dinosaur heads! And sure enough the work is from Orrell's series Planet of the Dinosaurs, on display now in the ANU School of Art's big and scintillating Graduation Exhibition.

Orrell (he has just graduated with Honours) explains that his dinosaurs series is only "whimsical" but that his inspiration for it comes from what he's learned of a 1970s enthusiasm for imagining "intelligent dinosaurs". The imagineers, thinking anthropomorphically, imagined what might have happened if these dinosaurs, as intelligent as our own cerebral species, had not become extinct but were still sharing the planet with us.

Orrell says that, being satirical about the "intelligent dinosaur" enthusiasm he's taken this anthropomorphising of dinosaurs to another level.

"And so I've created a human/dinosaur hybrid."

Yes, his hybrids are so eerily human-looking that, really, strolling around Civic like this (and perhaps another of them is driving the ACTION bus we can see in the background) they almost seem to be unremarkable members of today's multicultural Canberra.

One of the two chap/dinosaur hybrids even seems so integrated with society that he has an all-human female companion. Should they wish to marry will the progressive Gallagher government pass legislation enabling it? Yes, we're sure it will.

ACT self-government, let alone by governments as progressive as Katy Gallagher's, was not even dreamed of when (between 1922-1965) and the little working-class suburb of Westlake was nestled in Yarralumla. As much discussed here, Westlake, vanished now, (how can a suburb vanish, how can we make it happen to vulgar, ugly suburbs like O'Malley?) is presently being virtually brought to life by Anthology, the poignant theatrical walking tour of the lost suburb's memory-rich site.

Our discussion of lost Westlake has brought us a sweet blizzard of readers' recollections of their own and of rellos' lives lived in part at Westlake. And the industriously productive Canberra historian Alan Foskett, noticing and appreciating today's discussions of yesterday's Westlake, reminds us that Westlake is not our only vanished suburb.

"Westlake, Molonglo, Russell Hill and Causeway (the latter still there but in a somewhat different form from the way it was in the 1920s) were the four 'workers' settlements' providing basic accommodation for workers and their families [while] the Federal Capital Commission was meeting the building industry challenges of the 1920s."

Foskett reminds us that the Russell Hill workers' settlement, notoriously makeshift and temporary-looking, was right "in the middle" of where today's salubrious and permanent-looking inner-north suburb of Campbell stands.

The 120 settlement dwellings there were home-made, by those who had to live in them in this unfashionable neighbourhood, from materials donated from the FCC. This meant Foskett reports that the result was "homes ranging from humpy style to the quite substantial, the latter more likely if the breadwinner happened to be a carpenter!" The settlement contained a dell known as "Poverty Gully" and sometimes as "Hangman's Gully" because of two reported early hangings there.

"The Russell Hill homes were progressively removed, but it wasn't until 1957 (by which time the building of the suburb of Campbell was underway) that the last Russell Hill family, the Wensings, vacated their home."

Prominent Canberra public servant and mover and shaker Charles Daley hated Russell Hill, and Westlake too, for their un-Canberran shabbiness and unsavoury shadiness. In his 1994 memoir As I Recall he fumed that it was "scandalous" that so awful a place as Russell Hill, "with its long, unsavoury association with 'Poverty Gully' " had had its place name revived in the official name for the Russell Offices.

Alive today Daley would probably be boycotting Anthology (it continues until 6 December) but today's Canberrans can find all about it at anthology.net.au