Susan Winning, biographer of Canberran Neil Davey who was pivotal to the wonderfully successful conversion, reports that Davey recalled for her the discussion about what the new currency would be called.

He told her that "There was a group who suggested that the new unit, if it was going to be changed from the original value, should be called the new pound. So, for a while we would have had pounds and new pounds circulating concurrently. That was quickly abandoned because it was just too complicated. And of course, British-to-his-bootstraps Prime Minister Menzies wanted to call the new currency the royal."

The Reserve Bank of Australia dutifully created some preliminary royals banknotes, such as the tinted beauty in our picture.

But Aussies revolted, bless them, when in June 1963 Treasurer Holt announced that the unit was to be the "royal". Good on 'em. They seem to have shown some of the same enlightened horror we showed many years later when neo-Menziesian PM Abbott gave Prince Philip a knighthood.

After reaction to the 1963 announcement Harold Holt duly wrote a cabinet submission conceding the name "royal" was not going to work. He suggested the unit be called the "dollar".

But now to something no amount of royals or dollars can buy for a city.

If you love this city and love your privileged First World life here it is tempting to think that it is a city that has everything (save for light rail, but even that long-awaited boon will be with us soon).

And yet, we were reminded while listening wistfully last week to an ABC Radio National Life Matters interview with Brett Patman of Lost Collective and Tim Frawley of Abandoned Australia, ours is a city sadly deficient in ruins. At the Lost Collective and Abandoned Australia blogs you find messrs Patman and Frawley, both photographers, celebrating the strange wonder, the magnificent decay of abandoned structures.

To help our discussion John Bundock has sent us a picture of something rare and ruin-like he has found near the Cotter. He muses that but for the fact that he is an atheist he'd be tempted to call it a Stairway To Heaven. And, yes, it does suggest something a secretive religious cult has created as a kind of launching pad for the Heaven-bound when, any day now, the End Of The World comes.

Sensitive readers will not need any evangelising from us to be persuaded of the strange, sad, hypnotising romance of ruins.

An essayist in Prospect Magazine has mused that "There can hardly be a subject richer in associations than ruins—nothing more likely to conjure up poignant reflections on loss, decline, the calamitous fate of past glory, past grandiosity ..."

Today there is a fascination with what is sometimes called "ruin porn" (in 2013/2014 Tate Britain had a popular Ruin Lust exhibition), which has ruins of relatively recent times exerting their charms.

So for example in Europe there is some treasuring now of great brutish concrete wartime edifices flung up during World War II. Closer to our own times, one of the great hotspots of ruin porn is the US city of Detroit where the sudden decline and fall of the motor industry has left a melancholy (but eerily fabulous and serially photographed) Motownscape of abandoned factories.

Ruins have such a peculiar appeal that some of us, especially when used to ruin-festooned places (this columnist is a migrant from and frequent traveller to England's ruin-rich east Anglia) find ruinless places (like Canberra) unhappily lacking in character.

With what envy we hear The Pogues singing affectionately of their dirty old town, wishing antiseptically clean Canberra had some of their town's endearing old filth.

I met my love by the gas works wall
Dreamed a dream by the old canal
I kissed my girl by the factory wall
Dirty old town
Dirty old town

Canberra's ruin-impoverishment is in part due to our being so young a city, to our never having been a manufacturing city (no giant factories to abandon), and to a national capital obsession with neatness and tidiness. Authorities here sweep up and take away almost anything that offers the promise of becoming pornographically ruined.

Canberrans, what are we to do about this?

One possibility is that we might commission the making and the installation of some brand-new ruins, like a new old canal. Some 18th century English aristocrats commissioned brand-new (but abandoned-looking) ruins to give their estates some attractive mock antiquity.

But to be practical, money (neither dollars or royals) can't buy Canberra ruins.

Instead, governments, realising how essential ruins are to a city's character, might look to the future and instead of knocking redundant structures down leave them to decay so that they acquire some ruin-porn sexiness.

So for example The Lodge, when inevitably a grander prime ministerial residence is erected near the lake, should be left to become gorgeously bat-infested and crumbling. The Canberra Stadium, surely in its twilight as a sports venue, should be left to decompose majestically, for the nearby bushland to creep up and invade it, for its dear, old, once modern-looking floodlight pylons and lights, to take on the "melancholy grandeur" (painter John Constable's feeling about the very best ruins) that an abandoned gasworks acquires with time.