After being biffed by shellfire in January 1915, she leant precariously, absurdly, from atop the basilica.

Images of the half-toppled Virgin featured on postcards galore. Soldiers in France, having seen the unforgettable spectacle, sent postcards of the statue home to their loved ones.

John Gibson of Yarralumla has the set of two French postcards of the Albert spectacle sent to family members in 1916 by his father, Bernard (Billy) Gibson, while serving in France.

Meanwhile, the poignantly horizontal Leaning Virgin (today restored, upright again and goldenly gleaming) has just got a new guernsey as a feature of Jim Kaucz's Anzac centenary souvenir.*

The statute atop the basilica, featuring the Virgin holding the infant Redeemer aloft (in the pose of a successful female athlete showing off her trophy), was hit by warring fire. After that, it leant with increasing precariousness until 1918, when further fire knocked it down.

Gibson's father, serving with the Coldstream Guards Machine Gun Regiment, sent two joined postcards home to his sisters and mother in Sheffield, England. One shows the pre-war Virgin upright and then another (the Gibson postcard of our picture) depicts her leaning dramatically "apres le bombardement".

Across the cards, Bernard Gibson wrote: "You can see the statue on the tower? It has been dislodged by German shellfire and you are puzzled to think how it keeps from falling, there appears to be nothing to hold it. The French people say that when it falls, the war will end, all rubbish of course, but if not, I wish the thing would fall."

The local credulists were wrong about the statue's final tumble coinciding supernaturally with the war's end.

After British artillery knocked it down in 1918 (one suggestion is the British bombarded the basilica' s tower lest the occupying Germans used it as an observation post), it was another seven months until the armistice.

"My father was wounded three times and gassed twice," John Gibson reports, "so further postcards were often sent to his family from various hospitals.

"He was sending cards and letters to his three elder sisters and his mother. His sister, Gladys, who was an invalid, was the one who was keeping an album and so he tried to send her a wide variety of cards, some with idyllic pictures of the French countryside pre-war. He mostly wrote that he 'was in the pink' and told Gladys not to worry about him."

But now, after that entirely appropriate Anzac week visit to the Great War, we return to our own exciting times, to increasingly "vibrant" Civic. To Bundagate!

The story so far. Monday's radically feminist column looked at the way in which the pavement/roadway of the Bunda Street "shareway" has just been decorated with illustrations of Gang-gang cockatoos.

This would be admirable, we seethed, but for the fact that (outrage!) every Gang-gang in the Bunda Street pictures appeared to be male.

Monday's column sported a photograph of this apparent Bundablokeishness and grumbled about the sexism and plumageism of what has happened.

Adult males have that spectacularly crimson head but surely it is plumageist, when depicting the species, to ignore the females' more subtle loveliness.

In responsible depictions of our faunal emblem, a male is always juxtaposed with a female since, of course, it is the dear species that is our faunal emblem, not just the species' foppish chaps.

One of the first to notice what seemed to have happened was witty photo-manipulator and ornithologist Geoffrey Dabb. To make a point, he has created some Towards Gender Equity images. As you can see from the one we sport today, he has added, in a virtual way, some female Gang-gangs to one of the just installed Bunda Street all-male pictures.

But since then, the plot thickened, or thinned, (we're not sure which) when on Monday we received a call from TAMS Minister Shane Rattenbury.

He hadn't noticed the gender inequity of the designs. However, now that it's been pointed out to him by the avifaunally alert and given that there are, he said, "lots more Gang-gangs to come" as Bunda Street is transformed, he was going to ask the artist, Geoff Filmer of Graffik Paint, to have some females among the cockatoos to come.

Since then, in conversation with Filmer, the artist promises us that when completed, there will be "lots of females" in Bunda Street. They will be especially abundant towards the middle of that thoroughfare.

Meanwhile, yes, at the entrances to the shareway, he has gone for an abundance of males. He did this because the "impact colour" of the males' vermilion skulls imparts just the sort of cheeriness the shared space (shared by slow-moving motorists, cyclists and pedestrians) needs to transform it and make it gay and welcoming.

He admits, too, that because of the limited paints ("I can use only three colours"), using the kind of sturdy road paint you see, for example, on road areas coloured green to indicate they are cycleways, the subtleties of plumage are challengingly difficult to capture in these "stylised" portrayals of these special fowls.

*Order your limited-edition Anzac centenary souvenir print via canberratimes.com.au/anzac100