Surely it is some kind of hoax being perpetrated by the reserve's fun-loving staff. How clever of them (and yet in a way how cruel, surely of interest to the RSPCA) to somehow attach a toy duck's head to something real and furry – perhaps a long-suffering water rat – to bewilder visitors to the reserve's streams and billabongy dams.

But of course we are having a lend of you and John Bundock's great photograph is of a wild Duckbilled Platypus revelling in the reserve's Sanctuary area.

It is just that however often one sees a platypus (and Bundock fancies "Tidbinbilla has become the best place in Australia for visitors to see wild platypus") it always comes as a credulity-testing surprise.

Some of you will know the story of how, in 1799, the naturalist George Shaw of the British Museum received a truly bizarre animal specimen from Captain John Hunter in Australia. It suggested a duck's head grafted on to the pelt of a mole. Shaw duly wrote up a description of it for a learned journal while expressing his "doubts" about its authenticity. He fancied "there might have been practised some arts of deception in its structure".

And what does the platypus have in common with the mermaid? No, it is not that the ACT has mermaids as well as platypuses (if only our disappointingly dreary Lake Burley Griffin did have something so interesting). It is that the surgeon and naturalist Robert Knox fancied that the platypus was, like the mermaid, a "monstrous imposture" concocted by clever Chinese sailors well known for their skill at stitching together hybrid creatures.

The Tidbinbilla platypuses may not know it (although what a platypus really knows and thinks is a mystery) but for ACT humans it will soon be Christmas and the time for sending and receiving Christmas cards.

Here (pictured) is a hand-made Christmas card of special historical Canberra significance. Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll explain that ArchivesACT reports that as well as its ye olde files of ACT government records, it has "a small library of publications" that includes a three-volume set collectively called The History of Canberra. The three books cover the region's history from 1820 to 1980. They are Canberra 1820-1913 by Lyall Gillespie (1991), Canberra 1913-1953 by Jim Gibbney (1988), and Canberra 1954-1980 by Eric Sparke (1988).

"While opening up one of these volumes recently," ArchivesACT rejoices, "not only did it provide the answer to our research needs but also gave us a little treat. Out popped a handmade Christmas card! The card has three signatures of the books' authors and contains a limerick that reads:

Three antiquities [the authors] writing a book,
Were convinced word processors were crook,
Till departmental work
Brought them up with a jerk.
The whole thing had received a new look!

"And the Christmas card was not the only card inside the Gibbney volume. There was also an invitation for Mr and Mrs N. Braidwood to attend the books' launch."

And, while we are generating this healthy trickle of Canberra household names of yesteryear, here comes another one. The invitation to the launch of volumes two and three, at Olims Ainslie Hotel on April 19, 1988, shows that the distinguished launcher was to be Emeritus Professor Manning Clark, AC.

Neville Braidwood's name will have rung bells in some mature-age Canberra belfries. Born in Perth in 1928, he became a journalist in Queensland but moved to Canberra in 1962, where he became for some years the chief of staff of that major metropolitan daily The Canberra Times.

Then, inexplicably, he defected to what real journalists call the "dark side", to the public service. He was, from December 1969 until retirement in January 1987, supremo of the ACT bureaucracy's Information and Public Relations Branch.

Yes, readers, its pays to give your old, dust-collecting books the occasional shake to see what has been left tucked into them since the Olden Days. Let us know of any treasures you find, although you will struggle to do as well as Saul Bellow's character Henderson of the novel Henderson the Rain King. The troubled Henderson inherits thousands of books from his (very rich) father and in the course of reading them (Henderson is a frantic reader, always looking for some wisdom about Life) finds many thousands of dollars in banknotes falling out of them. Banknotes had always been his father's closest-to-hand bookmarks.

Owlification

Our November 20 story (with touching picture) told how Boo (an imaginatively-named Boobook owl) had been disentangled from a farm's barbed wire, nursed back to health and successfully released. The story contained Boo's rehabilitator's condemnation of the leaving of tangles of discarded barbed wire, because wildlife does become entangled in it.

In our clodhopping expression we may have given the impression that Boo had been entangled in discarded wire. In fact Boo was entangled in a necessary and well-maintained fence (on a 100-acre property with livestock), and the wildlife-loving owners of that fence went to enormous pains to liberate Boo from it and to deliver him to care. They, Boo's liberators, never leave discarded wire around on their property and join in the heartfelt reminder that discarded barbed wire is notoriously dangerous to wildlife.