So let us all with one accord gasp in admiration of Frank Clowry who in the 1920s would often, on an unsophisticated iron velocipede, rattle to and fro across the 63 miles between Braidwood and the infant Canberra.

Frank Clowry (and more of his cycling feats in a moment) is on this column's mind because we are very Westlake-minded at the moment and because Frank Clowry (1876-1965) has important associations with that vanished suburb.

We are Westlake-minded at the moment because Anthology, the poignant theatrical celebration of Westlake, is underway* and because this column has been chattering about that and about all things Westlakey. Lots of readers, pricking up their ears at discussion of lost Westlake, have been contacting us to give us their Westlake reminiscences and folklore.

John Clowry has contacted us to tell us, "My grandparents and their family were the first family to move into Westlake, house number 16, in March 1924. My grandfather Frank Clowry was a foreman carpenter at the Provisional Parliament House."

Frank Clowry, almost always quite formally dressed (because he was foreman material) in a suit and in a natty hat, was a famous figure in Canberra and especially around the Parliament House site. The 1925 Christmas Edition (it was published on November 1!) of Canberra Illustrated carried a respectful caricature of Frank Clowry bustling busily from A to B with his trusty spirit level. His grandson John still has that spirit level.

John Clowry has sent us, too, this 1925 photograph of Frank Clowry at the growing Parliament House and he, John Clowry, even has the shy hope that one of this column's teeming readers may know who the other chap is. The Clowrys have never been able to identify him.

But how did Frank Clowry and his family become early (indeed the first) denizens of Westlake?

John Clowry is proud to be able to show that his family has a 170-year, seven-generations' association with Canberra's region and then with Canberra itself, but alas we don't have room to do that enormous saga justice.

But the Westlake connection began in March 1924 when Frank and Edith (formerly Edith Ffrench) and their children (including John Clowry's father, just 17 months old) became the first family to move into the workers' settlement at Westlake.

They'd been living at Reidsdale, near Braidwood, and until the move to Westlake in 1924 and with Frank working in Canberra, at the end of the working week he would cycle home to Braidwood. Then to get back to work, he reminisced to the Canberra Times in 1946, "I used to leave Reidsdale about 9pm on a Sunday and often arrived too early for work, so used to rest under a tree at Acton."

What a long, contemplative night ride this must have been across the quiet, lonely immensity of the bush, with Frank Clowry, like Clancy of the Overflow, there beneath the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars!

God's handiwork with the stars would have been properly appreciated by Frank Clowry because he seem to have been religious, a Catholic. One historian says that "He was known as 'St Joseph' because of his carpentry work for St Christopher's church."

In July 1928 the Catholic journal The Angelus sang his praises and gave a thumbnail sketch of him.

"Frank Clowry, expert wielder of the carpenter's hammer, must be thanked for the predella on which the beautiful Altar rests at St Christopher's church. It was the work of many hour's duration, but a genuine labour of love to the most undemonstrative man [in Canberra] ... Westlake's tall and bashful carpenter."

We can never read of prodigious feats of cycling in the olden days (feats like Frank Clowry's) without being reminded of Flann O'Brien's novel The Third Policeman.

It discusses a policeman in rural Ireland who went everywhere by bicycle and along bumpy rural lanes and tracks (surely rather like the primitive surfaces Frank Clowry knew between Braidwood and Canberra).

Over time, O'Brien described, with scientific plausibility, there was such a sustained exchange of atoms between the constantly shaken bicycle and the constantly shaken policeman that it was no longer possible to say with certainty which of them was the bicycle and which the policeman.

I noticed the same phenomenon (trust me, I'm a journalist) in busy veteran journalists in the dear old smoke-filled newsrooms of the 1960s and 1970s. We used heavy old metal typewriters and, in our passion for the news, used to hammer and hammer at their keys. The exchange of atoms was so sustained, so vigorous, that in some older journalists it was impossible to tell which of them was now the reporter and which the Olivetti on which he had spent a career pummelling out the news.

* The Anthology