Most of today's essential and irresistible edition of The Canberra Times is brimming with reality but this column likes to offer pilgrims surreal sanctuary from the reality of news. And so here (pictured) is Georgia Elith's oil on canvas Everything She Used To Be (2015).
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The needle on our Surrealometer began to dance when, on Wednesday and attending the elites' preview of the ANU School of Art Graduating Exhibition 2015 (for the masses it opens on Saturday) we came upon Elith's work.
It is a series of five exquisite little paintings. In the one pictured, the first of the sequence, water is beginning to seep from the ceiling into a room in which a young woman (Elith tells us that, yes, it is sort of her) is carried away by the music she is listening to. It is a favourite of hers, a 21st century Icelandic rock band, being somehow, surreally, played on a ye olde early 20th century gramophone. Sheet music is on the floor beside her.
But as the series progresses the water in the room gets deeper and deeper until, by the fourth, the sheet music has been made into paper boats that bob on the waters and the woman is holding up the gramophone to save it from the rising tide.
What's going on, the artist tells us, is that among other "personal" things she was trying to express how overwhelming her studies had become. She has been doing a double degree Bachelor of Visual Arts/Bachelor of Music often "wondering how to keep my head above water".
There are many astonishing things in this vast, labyrinthine exhibition (it occupies many of the school's rooms, corridors and nooks) but the needle on your columnist's Astonishometer was especially animated by Gareth Dunstone's Minister for Bitches (2015).
When, overcoming your horror at its subject matter, you get up really close to this far-larger-than-life digital art portrait of Tony Abbott you make an amazing discovery. It is a kind of digital mosaic made up of 11,000 teeny-weeny pictures of bitches (sorry, women) and of women's bare feet.
If we can get an image of it we will bring it to you, with the explanation by the artist (who has shocked us by testifying that he dislikes Mr Abbott) of what it all means.
Tony Abbott will want to see his portrait Minister for Bitches and we advise him, and you, that the ANU School of Art Graduating Exhibition is open from November 28 to December 6, Monday to Sunday 10.30am-5pm.
Yes, the needle on the Astonishometer was flickering madly at the School of Art but it becomes even more galvanised by some of the wondrous goings-on in Nature.
And of those wonders few things compare with the ways in which Tawny Frogmouths (pictured) have evolved to be so perfectly camouflaged in the bush. Roosting and stock still an individual looks like dead wood on a tree.
'Tis the season when readers begin to send us their frogmouth pictures. Today's 's exquisite picture has just been taken by famous outdoors identity Matthew Higgins.
He reports that "My wife Stephanie Haygarth and I have been watching tawny frogmouths on Mt Ainslie for several years. Our observations have been greatly assisted by Canberra's 'froggie guru', the wonderful Scottish-born Stuart Rae of the ANU who has helped us find a number of the birds' territories.
"This season we watched seven pairs on western Mt Ainslie. Five fledged young successfully, the other two lost their chicks at fledging time, one probably due to the heavy downpour that occurred that very night, the other because those particular parents still have a lot to learn and have repeatedly fledged their chicks too soon before the young ones can fly sufficiently well.
"Froggies are incredibly loyal to territory and, at each breeding season, build their nest close to the previous year's site - often in the same tree and often in the same branch junction. Nests are typically loose platforms of twigs - how they don't blow away is a miracle - probably the birds' weight is a key part of the engineering. One family this year adopted the novel approach of using an old chough nest which is a large clay cup."
Alas, froggies' nests do sometimes blow away and this column has reported heartwarming instances of suburban human intervention to save the waifs.
"Froggies are particularly endearing," Higgins continues, "due to (a) their simply amazing camouflage."
"Their plumage markings, together with their instinctive posturing to resemble branches (which Steph and I call 'doing the stick') very successfully allow the birds to blend with the bush background. When we show them to people the people usually go 'wow' with genuine wonderment. And (b) when the chicks fledge, the sight of parents with chicks beside them is very cute - maybe even cute enough to rival kitten videos on YouTube one day."
"Frogmouths, as night birds like owls, trigger humans' sense of wonder and mystery.
Most Canberrans don't even know they are there as we humans are diurnal and the birds are nocturnal, and their camouflage means most people walk right by them."
