Now adventurous Curtin is the site of yet another Canberra "first". John Lovering's Little Free Library (LFL) on the edge of his Curtin front garden where it meets the street, appears to be the first Canberra LFL.

But we can expect many more of them in time because the relatively young LFL movement (it has its own informative website at littlefreelibrary.org) is sprouting. There are now more than 21,000 of them in the world (most are in the United States) and now there is a pioneering sprinkling of them in Australia.

To create your LFL, Lovering explains: (retired now, he worked at the National Library of Australia and so is an understandably book-minded chap) "You make your own box, best of all from some recycled material you've got in your own shed. You build it, you put it up on the street where people will pass by it and you stock it with some books. You have a sign on it inviting anyone to come and take a book and perhaps leave a book of their own."

When he came across the concept he enthused to himself "What a fantastic idea!"

He thinks it is, in a modest way, "a world-changing idea", and certainly, from his descriptions of what's happened, it's been a neighbourhood-changing idea. It's enabled him to meet neighbours galore he'd not really known.

"It's created a bit of a sense of community. It puts a smile on people's faces. People say that it's so nice to have something like this in the street."

Contributors of books are encouraged to write just a little inside the front cover to say what they've enjoyed about the book.

Mischievously we wondered if one day one of Lovering's neighbours will donate a brand, spanking, newish copy of Fifty Shades Of Grey with lubricious comments written inside it. But we kept this vulgar thought to ourselves because John Lovering sounds so nice and idealistic. He wanted to enthuse instead about how someone had donated a copy of Anne Of Green Gables because as a child it had been her favourite book.

There's a great individuality about the world's thousands of LFLs. Hand-made by their curator/librarian, no two are alike. Lovering's LFL's individuality consists in part of it being decorated with pots of flowers.

Of course all thinking readers will be wondering whether or not a Little Free Library would work in their street. Curtin is a leafy, civilised suburb made up of leafy, civilised, tertiary-educated neighbours who read books. But there are places in Canberra (and as I never tire of boasting I once lived in a character-building part of Kambah where pizza delivery businesses didn't dare to deliver pizzas) where a Little Free Library might be a pearl cast before swine.

Lovering, though, says he installed his LFL "to delight people" and that is what has happened in his corner of Curtin.

Meanwhile, perhaps, in this politics-conscious city, copies of Graham Freudenberg's classic A Certain Grandeur, Gough Whitlam's Life in Politics will flit in and out of Canberra's LFLs.

Gough Whitlam is on our mind because his name was on some lips at Wednesday's exciting occasion of the unveiling of the name "City Of Canberra" given to the fabulously restored Beyer-Garratt 6029 steam locomotive. As reported in Thursday's column, Whitlam as PM did some of the moving and shaking needed to bring the giant juggernaut to Canberra to one day go on display at a national museum. In very old age Whitlam was fond of 6029 and glad it had found a goodCanberra home.

And the awesome 6029 turns out to be in a sense a political locomotive, one caught up in the dramas of the Whitlam years. At Wednesday's event Bruce Macdonald an emeritus steam buff reminisced (with 6029 gasping, hissing, sighing beside him) about his, and Gough's, part in it all.

In the early 1970s an inquiry was set up to think about a national museum for Canberra. Macdonald was associated with the inquiry and when it began to dream of acquiring steam locomotives for the museum he, as "a train buff", was consulted. When it was found there could be only one locomotive Macdonald reasoned it had to be a Garratt because all six states employed Garratts of some kind.

He got on to a Sydney mate, a chief mechanical engineer with NSW railways, and said "I'd like a good Garratt." And the 6029 behemoth was duly earmarked.

"And the next thing was that I had a call from the public service secretary to the museum inquiry and he said 'We've got to get that Garratt quickly, and we've got to get it into Commonwealth property."

The urgency was that the Whitlam crisis (to end with his November 1975 sacking by the Governor-General) was under way. The acquiring of the Garratt was a Whitlam-approved initiative. Who could tell what would become of the arrangement once other, different governments with gibs of a very different cut, were in power?

So Macdonald and others got a steam-powered wriggle on.

"We got it [the chosen Garratt] steamed to Goulburn where I'd found Commonwealth property in the PMG Department's coal siding. So it came to Goulburn and it had board and lodgings in the PMG's siding, Commonwealth property [making its acquisition by the Commonwealth a fait accompli]. And it stayed there until the clouds departed and then it came on to Canberra."