They, the feathered political scientists, even noticed a lack of lustre in the plumage of the two major parties, an observation since borne out by the results. One in four voters spurned the lacklustre major parties in exactly the way in which a peahen rejects peacock suitors whose displayed tail feathers lack the gloss of radiant health.

The astute birds noticed, too, the relatively lustrous plumage of a politically healthy Nick Xenophon (whose black hair is always uncannily lustrous anyway, almost blue-black like a raven's, without a trace of grey).

We wondered if there might even be a LEGO Nick Xenophon or Pauline Hanson at this year's looming seventh Brick Expo, but those expectations seem to have been (as the tabloids might put it) hosed down. Instead, though, Expo spokeswoman Mel Bezear is promising that star exhibits will include a 15-metre replica of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

With our typical lean, nosey, ferret-like hunger for news scoops we begged her for a photograph of this wonder, but Expo organisers want to tantalise LEGO fans into rolling up to see it in its LEGO flesh.

Such is the hard-to-explain but very real allure of LEGO (even this columnist, usually an intellectual snob, feels it) that the Brick Expo has over the years built itself into not a replica of a major Canberra midwinter event but a real major Canberra midwinter event. In 2015 more than 13,000 people thronged along. This year the event has been extended to three days July 29, 30 and 31 at the Hellenic Club Woden. Friday, July 29, will provide reduced-number sessions for school groups and visitors with special/additional needs.

Expo won't allow us a sneak preview of its Golden Gate Bridge, but, sulking a little, we show instead a 2016 Expo exhibit it will let us bring you. It is a giant LEGO mural of Disney's Nemo (the clownfish star of Finding Nemo).

Mel Bezear explains that: "The mosaic is almost 64,000 individual LEGO pieces. It was made with the help of almost 3000 members of the Canberra community, who built it [over a day, at the National Museum of Australia]. The mosaic will eventually stand in the foyer of the pediatrics ward at the Canberra Hospital."

Proceeds from Brick Expo support PaTCH – Paediatrics at The Canberra Hospital; with Brick Expo 2015 contributing a $70,000 donation. Proceeds from Brick Expo support PaTCH – Paediatrics at The Canberra Hospital; with Brick Expo 2015 contributing a $70,000 donation.

Tickets for the Brick Expo are already on sale at www.brickexpo.com.au. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world of LEGO, there is a new YouTube series that honours (if it really does honour Beethoven by building a replica of him with popular toy plastic bricks) some of classical music's greatest icons. The videos are uploaded on the WowBrickArt YouTube channel and they include one that provides step-by-step instructions on how to construct Beethoven and his piano out of LEGO pieces, to the accompaniment, while you construct, of the great man's Moonlight Sonata.

The greatest challenge in the series (LEGO tragics love a challenge) is the 30-minutes-long video taking you through the 568 steps needed to build a huge church pipe organ of the kind played by Johann Sebastian Bach. In the finishing touch you add a tiny J.S. Bach, dwarfed by the colossus he is playing.

There will always be work for incomparable musical composers but some professions, some callings, just disappear with the passage of time. As someone whose ancestors were molecatchers (this was the profession they gave in the English census of 1901) this columnist is sensitive to this sad truism.

All of this is my moody way of explaining today's column's olde picture of paper boys, turned up in this newspaper's archives as we rummage in our past ahead of Saturday's momentous changes to your Canberra Times. Tell today's young people that once upon a time urchins were employed by newsagents to cycle around suburbia delivering actual newspapers (printed on paper!) to people's homes and they"ll scarcely believe you.

In our December 1974 picture Civic newsagent Mr Johnstone is presenting paper boy Mark Wootton with the bicycle he has won as Best All-Round Paper Boy. Other paper boys look on.

For generations of urchins being a paper boy was the introduction, and a character-building introduction at that (the dawn starts! the wind and weather! the angry dogs! the roar of suburbia the smell of the householders!) to the raw, capitalist world of paid work.

The paper boys in this historic photo belonged to a calling that today is well on its way to sounding as ye olde as molecatching.