Hamlet's view from up there, where he is a part of this year's fabled Sculpture By The Sea (SXS) exhibition, eclipses anything he ever saw through the Danish fog from Elsinore's grim Nordic Noir battlements. At Bondi he, Hamlet, is looking out across the spectacular Pacific.

"I saw a whale when I was installing him!" Harrison enthuses to us, describing how the work of installation (involving the use of a very large crane to lower Hamlet down to his precipitous site) paused so that everyone could enjoy watching the leviathan.

This is the 19th Sydney Sculpture By The Sea. Its organisers boast that it is the world's largest annual free-to-the-public outdoor sculpture exhibition. Harrison's is one of over 100 sculptures arranged along the two-kilometre Bondi to Tamarama coastal walk. The exhibition opens Thursday. Readers will notice from the photograph that this Hamlet (in his lap he has Yorick's skull and on his hand a little red bird) is part gloomy Dane, part horse. Harrison has done a Horse Man series and this is Hamlet the Horse Man. Harrison has long been a Shakespeare enthusiast and here we see his love of Shakespeare blended with something else.

"These [Horse Man] works draw on the animal/human hybrid gods of Ancient Egypt, and the spirit or totem animals of Aborigines: these mythologies were a unique and powerful connection to our fellow animals.

"The Horse Men were created after viewing brumbies in the Kosciusko region: these beautiful mammals, festooned with twigs and scars, are both statuesque and extremely destructive. Nonetheless, the wild horse has close ties with both white and black Australians, in our legends and spirituality.

"The wider picture of this stuff is the ongoing brutality and appalling mistreatment of animals by humans. I see this as a tragedy of epic proportions, and until our human ethics fully extend to all animals, we are condemned to a spiritual and evolutionary impasse. Hopefully the humour and playfulness of these works make the seriousness of intent more palatable."

He tells us that "The synchronicity of Hamlet being on at the Playhouse was too amazing to pass up. I wrote an email to John Bell alerting him to the exhibition and to Hamlet the Horse Man. He loved the pic I sent and it turns out he goes to SXS every year. I picked his brain about some Shakespeare questions as well. He was so generous with his time. Nice chap, too."

Shakespeare's Hamlet was never airborne but Harrison's Hamlet was airborne for a while in recent days as a hefty crane lowered this particular Hamlet to his precipitous niche at Bondi. Harrison says that because the outdoor SXS (there is an indoor one too, run in conjunction with it) sites works in what can be very exposed places the sculptures are required to be sturdy. His Hamlet is made from a tough-sounding material called BondCrete. What's more the show's artworks must of course be very firmly anchored to their potentially windswept spots. At one early SXS a sculpture took flight in a gale.

But what a wonderful outdoor gallery this is, Harrison rejoices to us from Bondi where you can hear from his voice he is having enormous fun.

Yes, Shakespeare's Hamlet is notoriously melancholy but Harrison's Hamlet/horse hybrid must surely be getting buzzes galore from the sometimes whale-enriched Pacific vistas.

Everything on display at Sculpture By The Sea is for sale and Harrison can imagine his burly BondCrete work, its all-weather hardiness beyond question, being given an outdoor life in a garden somewhere. It tickles us (but at the same time depresses us too) to imagine the reaction if an ACT government dared to hint at the possibility of purchasing Hamlet's Lament so as to install it somewhere as a piece of public art. What apoplexy the suggestion would cause among Canberra's art-despising, bean-counting philistines, their ranks well-represented in our Assembly and in the troglodytes' playground that is the letters page of this newspaper.

Sculpture By The Sea sculpturebythesea.com/Home.aspx has just opened and continues until 8 November.

And while we're on the subject of creative, artistic Canberrans, here (pictured) is the bling-sprinkled bower of a satin bowerbird, set up in a front garden in Hawker.

Our correspondent reports that "the all-blue collection includes broken clothes pegs, assorted bottle caps, a biro lid, various bits of string, wool and plastic thread and some plastic mesh".

The male of the species (a beautiful glossy blue-purple-black creature that looks as if it's made from satin) builds the bower, from two parallel walls of sticks, as a courtship space. Then he tries to further impress a female by furnishing the place with blue objects. During his ritual strutting of his male stuff (lots of dance and lots of buzzing, whirring and rattling noises) he may brandish one of the blue items in his bill.

Lucky Canberra, where we live cheek by jowl with wildlife and where suburbia buzzes, whirrs and rattles with nature's gifts of beauty rich and rare!