The image that pleased so many of you was Austrian Johannes Stoetter's creation of a Crimson Rosella/Scarlet Macaw from a woman's body. We thought it a little sexist and really rather kitsch and so almost didn't run it. But thou, beloved readers, more delightfully bogany than we'd thought, loved it.

So today, still in Austria and still with this eye-catching art form, we bring you one of the creations from the just-held 15th World Bodypainting Festival in Poertschach, Austria. The woman is portraying (unforgettably, in my impressionable case) a pin-ball table.

Our reasons for showing you this include, and first-and-foremost, the need to boost the ratings of this far-too-chaste column with a little gratuitous semi-nudity.

But we use it also to support our standing suggestion to the Barr government that Canberra might replace dreary Floriade with a Southern Hemisphere Bodypainting Festival modelled on the Poertschach one. Competitors and tourists would flock here, and the staging of an annual event so sexy and zany would do a lot to counter the (not totally unfair) accusation that our city is a sepulchre run by fogeys, for fogeys.

Your eyeballs will bulge if you go online to look at whole galleries from the 15th World Bodypainting Festival, dreaming as you do of something comparable happening here.

When the Southern Hemisphere Bodypainting Festival is established in Canberra it will earn us tourist dollars galore and Tuesday's column dwelled on how on 14 February 1966 our nation put aside pounds, shillings and pence and adopted dollars and cents. Today's giant coins picture is of a 1965 educational decimal conversion TV ad being made.

We had no room on Tuesday to discuss how at the time there was a big, loyal push to call our new unit of currency not the dollar but the "royal". Our item has reminded some mature-age readers of that hot debate.

And it was discussed a lot at Monday's event at the National Archives when Dr Neil Davey, 94, gave the nation some important decimal conversion papers. In the 1960s he was a crucial mover and shaker of the conversion. The press called him "Mr Decimal."

He especially but others too on Monday remembered how the push for the "royal" (some remember Sir Robert Menzies being keen on that) was eventually rebuffed, with the help of a press aghast at the daft idea. Some at Monday's occasion wondered if we saw in this national unease over the "royal" an early hint of the republican sentiments that lurk in the national bosom today. Someone at Monday's gathering (it may even have been this columnist?) was unkind enough to growl that there'd have been no chance of "royal" being dropped if that knighthood-seeking royalist lickspittle Tony Abbott had been PM at the time of such a change.

And at Monday's event and as reported here there was much informed discussion of how wonderful the huge, 1960s achievement of the conversion was. Well done, that golden Australia! We agreed that change like it seems unimaginable today in an embittered and childish political climate in which governments and oppositions pour molten slime over one another's grand visions.

Perhaps, too, our 1960s rejection of the "royal" was part of the same maturity we had then but have since lost as we've degenerated back into national pubescence. Surely the "royal" would triumph today, given our PMs royalism and our misguided nation's unAustralian infatuation with young and fecund Will and Kate.

Shuddering, we turn away from the Royal Family and turn to Nature and to how readers are springing to join our discussion of welcome harbingers of Canberra's Spring. Those harbingers are more welcome than usual after this unusually marrow-freezing Winter. Tuesday's column glowed with a photograph of a Canberra Magpie with a billful of nesting materials.

Entomologist Dr Philip Spradbery (yes, the European Wasp expert and our Sir Galahad in the fight against those exotic pests) suggests several harbingers including "flirtation" among Crested Pigeons.

Yes, notice how, running along the ground, the males are chasing the females everywhere and are (the males) fanning out their tails in a peacockish way. Do they do this for the same reason that peacocks are said to, because this display of feathers gives females a chance to see whether the displayed feathers are radiant with the good health females look for in a mate?

Once upon a time Dr Spradbery was by birth and education an Englishman and asks "Do you remember there was always some country squire who heard the first spring-time cuckoo in England and a letter would appear in The Times to announce the claim?"

Yes, we (once English ourselves) do remember that. But we also remember how as urchins we used to lurk, sniggering, in the woods near the homes of our country town's Times-subscribing toffs and play authentic-sounding cuckoo calls with a flute-like instrument one of us had made. We used to do this far earlier in Spring than the real cuckoos would pipe up and fancied that all over Britain our brother toff-teasing urchins were playing the same prank so that all of the first-cuckoo-of-spring correspondence with newspapers was based on delusions. As a true sign of an Australian Spring our pigeon flirtations, impossible for urchins to fake, are utterly reliable.