But alas it emerged from the story that while the new buildings will be quite towering in the timid Canberra context (the tallest of them will soar to a giddying 70 metres) they are going to be stubby and nondescript in the great skyscraping scheme of things. Loyal readers will know that this column engages in an occasional series that wonders, wistfully, when if ever our city will be decorated with some buildings zany enough or beautiful enough to make a reasonable person gasp when he or she sees them.

Coinciding with the dashed hopes just reported was my trespass online into eVolo Magazine where invitations have just been issued to architects, students, engineers, designers, and artists from around the globe to take part in the 2016 Skyscraper Competition. There you will find http://www.evolo.us/competition/ a wealth of detail, including bedazzling pictures, of the recently announced 2015 winners.

eVolo (dubbing itself the "Architecture and Design Magazine for the 21st Century" has been running this tournament since 2006, to "recognise innovative proposals for vertical living". If you have half a soul and if exciting architecture ideas float your gondola then there are some great buzzes to be had by going online to look at galleries of the entries of past years. They even include designs for underwater skyscrapers.

Looking at this year's eVolo winners will deepen a Canberran's yearnings (unless he is a fossilised fogey) for our city's skyline to brandish some buildings that bristle with some of this flair and grandeur.

The 2015 winner, Essence Skyscraper by a Polish team, is actually something we don't need in this little, parks-and-greenery blessed Bush Capital, because it is "an urban megastructure that contains diverse natural habitats". It is not a megastructure to live in or work in but a place for people living and working in a huge, built-up, nature-smothering metropolis to visit "to briefly escape urban life". And so it contains 11 diverse parks and habitats to walk and even ski in. There is even, high, high above the concrete jungle of the city, a green and lush jungle.

The 2015 runner-up is some Indian architects' dream of a Shanty-Scraper. It imagines sprawling low slums in Chennai (and anywhere else in India) somehow replaced by a towering, vertical shanty megasuburb.

Then there is another winner, a British design, that imagines skyscraping Vertical Factories for New York.

The 2015 competition's 15 honorable mentions include the Noah Oasis (pictured). Imagined by a visionary Chinese team it imagines the transformation of abandoned oil rigs into "vertical bio-habitats" irresistible to wildlife. In one of the team's illustrations (pictured here) dolphins are so ecstatically happy in this brilliant bio-habitat that they leap for joy, leaping higher than dolphins have ever leapt before.

Fine skyscrapers have a certain grandeur about them and so of course, in his heyday, did Edward Gough Whitlam. Graham Freudenberg's A Certain Grandeur - Gough Whitlam's Life in Politics, is one of the classics of Australian political writing.

We have just had the 40th anniversary of that grand man's dismissal by Sir John Kerr (whose biography might have been called A Certain Hauteur). And to mark that 40th anniversary of that horror the Labor Party has issued a "limited-edition tea towel" (pictured). They are available online from the ALP Shop. https://shop.alp.org.au/

"I remember 1975," Labor's national campaign director George Wright tells us in a heartfelt statement accompanying news of this artefact.

"I remember where I was when Gough Whitlam was dismissed. It's one of those moments in history that you'll never forget. But more importantly, I will never forget the legacy that Gough left us. Access to university, Medibank … and so much more. His legacy is our legacy.

"I want every Labor supporter to be able to show their pride for Gough and his achievements as a Labor Prime Minister and a Labor Legend. That's why we've released these limited edition tea towels to mark the 40th anniversary of the dismissal. With this tea towel, you can show your Labor pride or even give one to a fellow true believer to show theirs. Whitlam may have passed, but his legacy and his ideas live on."

We have run several items here in recent weeks about highly-collectible political memorabilia, including the John Howard and Tony Abbott 'Wipe the smile off his face" lavatory paper.

And yet we cannot get so enthused about these "limited-edition" tea towels (and can something be said to be a "limited edition" when it is made in its thousands, with George Wright boasting that 2000 have ben sold already?). What is uninspiring, for those of who loved Whitlam and knew his certain grandeur, is that a Whitlam tea towel seems a very nondescript object to be used to commemorate so towering a figure. A John Howard or Tony Abbott and especially a Bill Shorten tea towel would be fitting. But somehow a Whitlam tea towel seems (as the regrettable Bobblehead Jesus must seem to a devout Christian) disrespectful, almost to the point of blasphemy.

If there is to be Whitlam memorabilia then it needs to have a certain dignity about it. Readers' ideas are welcomed on this matter of great social, political and historical importance.