And so it comes as no surprise to discover, as we look for ideas for better ways of presenting the Canberra Airport arrivals area, to find that Christchurch International Airport (CIA) has airport arrivals spaces we would do well to imitate.

To recap: many sensitive Canberrans, led and goaded into grumbling by the No Airport Arms Ads (NAAA) activists, are fed up with the way in which the Canberra Airport arrivals area is dominated by great big advertisements for the wares of arms manufacturers. These ads (lots of sinister submarines, zooming fighter jets and ideal ships for rounding up asylum-seeking boat people) are almost the only decorations this forbidding space has. They seem, to some of us, an awful and inappropriate way to greet first-time visitors to our unique and metrosexy city and to welcome home returning Canberrans.

And so, being generally in agreement with the NAAA zealots, this column has shouted out (in a soft voice) for well-travelled Canberrans to help Canberra Airport with some ideas. Readers have been quick to tell us of airports that show some flair (sadly absent at Canberra) in welcoming arrivals.

Now Glenda Cloughley advises us that "Crossing The Ditch and arriving in Christchurch International Airport is a very different experience to returning home to those awful ads at Canberra Airport. Very good for the ears of bird lovers!"

She points us to an online description, with video http://www.adgraphix.co.nz/blog/christchurch-international-airport/ of what awaits those arriving at Christchurch. Here is CIA's online blurb about the sweet ambush that awaits arrivals.

"As soon as international passengers depart the aircraft at Christchurch International Airport, they can expect to experience a multi-sensory journey, which is designed to reflect New Zealand's South Island, for which the airport is the main point of entry for international visitors.

"The unique arrivals experience starts in the airbridge corridors, where specially commissioned floor-to-ceiling photographs [pictured] highlight four separate regions: the West Coast, Abel Tasman National Park, the Mackenzie Country, and the Antarctic, while a soundtrack of the environment [including bird calls] also features.

"For us, this is a way to let people know they have arrived at a very special place," explains Jade Reeves, Christchurch International Airport Limited (CIAL) marketing manager, who was the instigator and driver of the project. "It also makes the arrivals experience more positive and peaceful.

"[It is] a relaxing arrivals experience. While passengers queue in the customs area, they can watch a video presentation of the South Island's natural environment on Australasia's largest video wall, which comprises 54 seamlessly linked screens. Even the baggage reclaim hall is designed to reflect the destination through seasonal imagery.

"Furthermore, the installation of the Sensory Arrivals Experience has had a positive knock-on effect for the region's tourism industry, which is recovering following the damage caused by February's [2011] earthquake.

"Travellers are so inspired that they come to our travel and tourism desks, where travel and accommodation can be booked, and request to have a trip to exactly the place they have just seen on the airbridge, or along the walkways, or in the customs area," Reeves explained.

How about it, supremos of Canberra Airport? Can you see virtue in ideas lie these? Shouldn't our arrivals be telling people, for it is the gospel truth, that they have arrived at a very special place?

CIAL's PR spinsmiths make much of trying to make the "airport experience" a "peaceful and relaxing" one and of course it is true that for some travellers flying and everything connected with it is hellish. Your columnist, for many years afflicted with a phobic fear of flying (I am long since cured, Praise the Lord), addresses this subject with every sympathy for the ashen-faced afflicted. Anything at all that makes an airport even fractionally more relaxing is to be welcomed. Big, in-your-face advertisements for killing machines have nothing comforting about them.

Meanwhile, concerned readers are urging that our airport's arrivals space be decorated not with weaponry but with panoramas of this most panoramic city that travellers are arriving at.

This is bound to mean, however much aesthetes will shudder, that pictures of Floriade will get an arrivals area guernsey. And if Floriade is ever bearable (and we're not saying that it is) it will be on Tuesday (today).

Tuesday is the second annual Dogs Day Out at Floriade at which dogs are able to enjoy ("from a distance", Floriade's funsmothering killjoys insist) the displays of flowers.

We think it would be far more fun on the Dogs Day Out At Floriade to let the dogs run amok (to bring a little spontaneity to that show's inhibited, dragooned displays). It is hard to think of two things with less in common than anal-retentive, tightly-leashed Floriade and the average, exuberant, free-range dog (like the sunglasses-wearing one in our picture).

But the saving grace of Dogs Day Out at Floriade is that it comes with encouragement of everyone there to donate to the RSPCA. That worthy organisation's chief executive, Tammy Ven Denge, will be at Floriade from 10.30am.