Pssst. Gather round, impressionable heterosexual men. Your secret will be safe with me but please confide in me, whispering, if you have ever looked at electricity pylons and found something disturbingly womanly about them.
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A little more on this Freudian topic in a moment but first we remind you of the startling picture in last Wednesday's column of humanoid electricity pylons proposed for progressive Iceland. Several readers joined us in going "Gosh!" at this picture, at this brainwave. A Yarralumla reader was reminded by the item that once upon a time there was a posse of writers known as the Pylon Poets.
We will come to those distinguished scribblers in a moment. First, though, we remind you that architecture and design firm Choi+Shine has submitted designs for giant, human-shaped pylons entered for the Icelandic High-Voltage Electrical Pylon International Design Competition. The pylonic picture we ran with the item was so popular with sensitive readers that we bring you another one today.
On Wednesday we nattered about how electricity pylons like these support the discovery, pioneered by the sorts of very beautiful wind turbines now beautifying the Lake George bailiwick, that some man-made things can after all actually enhance a landscape. Wednesday's luminous essay looked forward to progressive governments in Australia thinking of something Choi+Shine-esque the next time they are thinking pylonically. After a brainwave like this why would we ever again put up pylons that are unremarkable, identical and ugly?
You can read all about the pylons and go "Gosh!" at pictures of them at http://www.choishine.com/Projects/giants.html
And, yes, the Pylon Poets were leftish 1930s left-wing poets including W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis and Louis MacNeice. They were famous for their uses of industrial imagery, for references to railway trains, skyscrapers, factories, roads and also the great, gaunt electricity pylons that were appearing, vista-transformingly, in the English countryside. The group took its name from Spender's 1933 poem The Pylons. It contains a memorable line, after the reading of which some of us will never see electricity pylons in quite the same way again. Spender has just described yesterday's innocent countryside of "sudden hidden villages" tucked among hills. He continues:
Now over these small hills
they have built ...
Pylons, those pillars
Bare like nude, giant girls that
have no secret.
Thank goodness that there's nothing Freudian in today's other image, borrowed from the Tuggeranong Arts Centre's timely (for the bushfire season is upon us) exhibition The Fire Did Not Beat Us.
As previously reported The Fire Did Not Beat Us is a pictorial history of the 100 years of organised bushfire fire-fighting in and around the ACT.
Canberrans are understandably fixated on the fires of 2003 but as firefighter Pat Barling, coordinator of The Fire Did Not Beat Us has explained to us, in the past century we have had "significant fire events" galore here. All of them have been fought by flesh-and-blood firefighters and the exhibition asks us to put ourselves in their boots (and in the sorts of helmets they used to wear) and to feel admiration for them and gratitude to them.
As reported the exhibition is very pictorial. Some of the photographs of fires and firefighting are so vivid that they seem to radiate heat, and, if you peer closely into them, to threaten to singe your eyebrows.
Today's circa 1968 black and white picture is not one of the exhibition's eyebrow singers but it is especially poignant given the catastrophic things that fire had in store, in 2003, for the observatory at Mt Stromlo. The Oddie telescope we see in the picture was among the observatory treasures destroyed in 2003.
A donation from astronomer James Oddie, it was installed on Mt Stromlo in 1911, thus becoming the first Commonwealth building built in the infant ACT.
The Fire Did Not Beat Us exhibition has opened at the Tuggeranong Arts Centre and continues until November 15. Details at http://www.tuggeranongarts.com/
One shudders to think what the ACT's fires have over the years done to the ACT's Powerful Owls in their horrifically combustible eucalyptus-clad mountain habitats.
For now, though, the city sighs with relief. For late last week, on Friday afternoon, plausible-sounding rumours began to circulate that the legendary Powerful Owl of Turner was dead. Someone had found the withered corpse of an owl in Haig Park, where the Powl is so sought-after by twitching photographers. Some of those out looking for the owl were assured by locals that their search was in vain because the owl's lifeless body had been identified. Dismayed Powl seekers asked us about these rumours. Someone sure of the Powl's death asked us to run a death notice.
But (joy! rapture!) urgent, expert ornithosherlockholmesery by members of the Canberra Ornithologists Group found the Powl still alive and well in Turner. What were thought to be the mortal remains of the Powl were instead a decomposing Mopoke, a deceased Boobook Owl.
In those dark hours on Friday we were imagining the Powl being a victim of accursed suburban cats or dogs. But now, rejoicing again, we can think of our pets in a better light with the Brumbies' announcement that "Brumbies membership is no longer exclusive to mankind."
"[We are] Introducing our new membership category so that our fans' best friends can show their support too."
For the $35 that pets invest in Brumbies membership the critters receive not only that warm, excited inner glow that dedicated fandom gives but also a choice of either a "Personalised mat" or a "Personalised name tag."
