She is thought to require an official portrait because the Liberal Party in its shameless jobs-for-the-matrons wisdom made her Speaker of the House of Representatives.

But why not, some of us will mutter, make her official portrait (for Australians to chortle at down the centuries) one of the many fine newspaper cartoons that lampooned her helicopter adventures?

Another possibility that leaps to our mind is that in her awful case she might be told to paint her own official portrait at her own expense.

And yet, now we come to think of it, because Bishop may have a tendency to vanity, the result of that would probably be like the one captured (see our picture of a self-portrait-painting cat) in Lucia Heffernan's Norman Catwell.

Heffernan's masterpiece is one of a galaxy of ripper pictures on exhibition in Los Angeles as we speak in the already-reported-here world famous LA Cat Art Show. Lovers of art and of cats can see an online Facebook gallery of the show's pictures. https://www.facebook.com/catartshowLA

Yes, if cats, notorious for their vanity, painted self-portraits how honest would they be? The suspicion that, bless them, they would err on the side of narcissism, is supported by Lucia Heffernan's painting. Who can tell how Bronwyn Bishop might flatteringly portray her very important self?

The Cat Art Show is at Los Angeles' fabled Think Tank Gallery, and while we are trespassing in the USA's great institutions here we are crossing the virtual threshhold of the Martha's Vineyard Museum.

Readers, we preface our visit with this question. What is the big difference between the Japanese whalers of 2016 (in the news today because last Thursday Japan's whaling fleet returned with a take of 333 whales including 200 pregnant females) and the North American whalers of the 19th century?

Yes, spot on, ever-astute readers! The Japanese whalers maintain their hypocritical fiction that their grisly sprees are all about "scientific research". By contrast the American whalers, those blubber-stained Ahabs, were always refreshingly frank about their whaling being just a matter of raw, unadulterated commerce.

And we get a glimpse of their no-nonsense, capitalist Ahabbery in our picture of a silhouette stamp of a whale with the number 145 inked on to it. Martha's Vineyard Museum http://www.mvmuseum.org/ has just issued five digitised whaling ship logbooks dating from the 1840s to the 1860s. Our whale is from an 1849 logbook.

"Each whaling ship that departed the north-eastern United States carried a logbook aboard, in which whale hunts, shipwrecks, weather conditions, and daily sailing life were recorded," splendid online arts magazine Hyperallergic reports.

"Due to their use out at sea, many suffered water damage, and those that survived weren't often recognised as valuable."

But today of course we can see, especially when we can feel in our souls the romance of olde, Moby Dickesque seafaring, that these five logs of the 19th century ocean-going everyday are priceless.

"There is a lot of information locked up inside these things, and they have not been accessible before," Bonnie Stacy, chief curator at the Martha's Vineyard Museum, told Hyperallergic. "There's a potential for a huge amount of data for scholarship and scientific inquiry that has not been readily available in the past."

The logbooks are even a resource for understanding how sea ice and climate changed over time, and can contribute to a model for predicting the Arctic's future.

"While the logbooks were meant purely as a form of record," Hyperallergic testifies, "some of their writers were more visually expressive, illustrating events like a whale upturning a boat, or the thrill of the pursuit of the giants of the deep ... Stamps of whales, with space for a number indicating how many gallons of oil were procured from each body, also accent text throughout the logbooks."

"The whale stamps and other drawings might be considered folk art today," senior book conservator Todd Pattison told Hyperallergic. "But at the time, they were just part of the documentation required for a commercial venture. Keeping the log was a job, but they were on those ships 24 hours a day for months and even years at a time. These records would have given them an outlet for expression at the same time they were recording business details."

Touchingly, conservators who got to grips with the unique challenges presented by the well-travelled, damaged, deteriorating ledgers, reported that the logbooks still smelled faintly of the ocean.

And it was a sensitively-warbled folk song about a shipwreck, the melancholy wreck of the Dandenong (all 83 aboard lost off Jervis Bay in September 1876), that found this columnist's cheek bespangled with an unmanly tear on Sunday at at National Folk Festival.

Australian damsel Hannah Pelka-Caven gave a touching rendering of this melancholy ditty. In it a ghostly drowned victim sings wistfully to her lover that she dreams of him, of coming home, of being warm, but that, alas, "A mile of water buries me/Beneath this raging foam".

It is not a good NFF if you don't get at least one, good, cleansing weep out of it. Some of the loveliness comes from having Australian songs about Australian events sung in Australian voices. Australian country music (all fake cowboys and cowgirls singing in fake Texan accents even when singing about Australia) has a long way to go to go to match Australian folk music's patriotic authenticity.