But in the olden days (starting in the 1920s) the muskets of our territory were sometimes taken to another troublesome creature, the European hare (Lepus europaeus).

On 10 August, 1928, a Mr F.P.Somerville of Red Hill wrote to the Federal Capital Commission's Chief Lands Inspector James Brackenreg to complain that "I am being troubled considerably by hares attacking my garden and should be glad if you could instruct your rangers to take steps to eradicate this pest."

Brackenreg preferred that Canberrans should tackle their own hares and, on 14 August, wrote to Mr Somerville to say this. But, sympathetic, he added "If there is anything I can do to assist in arranging a hare drive [driving the hares to somewhere where they could be corralled and blunderbussed en masse] I would be pleased to co-operate [using the Commission's rangers]."

ArchivesACT has just dusted off the file Destruction of Hares – ACT all about the damage the spectacularly long-eared herbivores did to Canberra gardens from the 1920s to the 1940s.

With hares in plague proportions in the Territory in the 1930s, Launceston's Examiner, noticing official FCT attempts to wipe them out and doing some familiar-sounding Canberra bashing, ran this fanciful "news" story.

"It is proposed, therefore, to use a small army of beaters to drive the hares from their havens towards the foot of Black Mountain, where they will face a withering barrage from the guns of people who care to use up federal government ammunition that is supplied to them free of charge."

The FCT's Lands Branch leapt to deny anything so lawless and Wild Westy was planned.

Showing no respect for rank and station, the 1930s hares ravaged the superior salad of the young and tasty plants in the (unfenced) gardens of The Lodge of the Prime Minister. How charming it is to imagine pairs of the fun-loving species "boxing" on the PM's lawns. The file has correspondence of July 1937 in which that mansion's Gardener In Charge asked for something to be done. James Brackenreg agonised over the cost of fencing (there was a quote of £30) saying it would be in vain if the Lodge's gates were left open – and he had never known anyone bother to close them. What innocent, security-oblivious times those were!

And so instead there were hare drives organised in the area, with nine hares destroyed in the drive of 12 August and 17 in the drive of 14 August. Future early-morning "patrols" of The Lodge's neighbourhood using "a lorry, with shooters" were envisaged.

While we're back in the olden days we remind you that Thursday's column nattered about how the Kingston Power Station is soon to have its 100th birthday. It began illuminating and powering little Canberra with that new-fangled electricity in July 1915.

Alan Kelly, 83, reminisced about how as a child living in the powerhouse's shadow he and friends would in winter hang around the powerhouse's chimney (it's base is still there, now supporting a sculpted column of light and glass). They lingered there because it was a blissfully warm place in a bitterly cold city.

He told us that he's sure that Canberra in winter in the olden days when he was a boy (he was born in 1932) was perhaps six degrees colder than today. He's sure that today's abundance of trees, buildings and roads has warmed things up.

This reminds us that our region is famously, folklorically cold, and of course it is only because the nation's leaders required the federal capital to be built somewhere with a "bracing" climate of at least 100 frosts a year that the city was built here.

And, on the subject of the famous chilliness of our district, 100 years ago this week Queanbeyan Municipal Councillor G. Morton argued that it was "too cold" here to stop drinking spirits.

The dear King was setting a wartime example to the Empire by vowing his regal lips would not touch liquor until the war was over. He agreed with temperance evangelists that our drunkenness was assisting the Huns.

But when this call to temperance was discussed by the Council 100 years ago this week, Council got frivolous and giggly about it. A David Hughes, noting this, wrote an entertainingly furious letter to Queanbeyan's Age. It was published 100 years ago this very day.

"Sir, In your Friday's issue is a report of how our local council declined to 'Follow The King' in his noble example of abstinence from liquor during the war. Mayor Woodward and his merry aldermen thought the King's example, and the movement arising out of it, a matter for mockery and jesting. Said one, 'It's too cold' to follow the King's example. May Alderman Morton never know some of the cold chills of horror that liquor has brought to so many lives and homes.

"Mayor Woodward was merry, sad, indignant and senseless, all at once. [Let these] grog-defenders take a tour of the lockup, then the hospital, then the jail, then the asylum, then the gallows ... to see the shame, suffering, and degradation the liquor business creates.

"All Council was asked to do was to give a helping hand to enable their weaker citizens to 'Follow The King' in his noble example of total abstinence. Yet our town fathers make merry jest over the drunkenness that is doing more harm to our Empire's cause than all the German submarines."