It was just as well that by then your timid columnist had learnt what this unnerving object was. Otherwise I might have let Fairfax Media down with an unmanly scream.

But by then I had been told that it was a venerable, much-used, head-shaped hat block of the kind used by milliners when they are crafting hats. It and some other hat blocks are to be a part of a new mini-exhibition in which they, the blockheaded blocks, will be hopelessly outglamoured by some of the exquisite hats of Andree Pelissier.

She was a young but accomplished Parisian milliner and arrived in Melbourne in 1948 on a two-year contract with the Marie France Salon, a fashion and fashion accessory boutique in the Myer store in Melbourne's Bourke Street.

Her job was to make high quality, irresistible hats for well-to-do and fashionable Melbourne women. She crafted the hats to detailed specifications based on the designs of six leading Parisian milliners. The National Museum has acquired some of her creations from the late milliner's family. This is the first time the museum has displayed the hats.

Pelissier, just 21 when she arrived in Melbourne, settled in Australia after marrying Geoffrey Webb. She was widowed in 1957 and returned to hat-making so as to keep the wolf from the door.

Her hats in the exhibition (most, probably, from the late 1960s although their exact vintage is not known) will generate many a quiet "Gosh!" from those who see them.

They are works sometimes of intricate complexity, sometimes of elegant simplicity. No wonder curator Laina Hall enthused about them in her chat with us. Nearby there were sounds of drilling and sawing as the last-minute work of installation went on.

"What they [the hats] demonstrate is her skill. They're beautifully finished. They're very creative. The detail in them is absolutely gorgeous. Look at this one, the hand-stitching, the layering of the petals, the addition of the netting."

Hall is enthusiastic too about the (slightly scary for the timid) hat blocks. Both of us enthused together about the terrific collection of these characterful artefacts that festoon the lobby of Hotel Hotel in New Acton.

"These blocks that were used to help create these lovely hats are wonderfully sculpted objects in themselves," Hall testifies.

"They were part of the process of making these beautiful creations. We're hoping that by having both the blocks and the hats on display we will get people thinking about the hat-making process as well as about the beauty of the hats that were so beautifully crafted at the high end of couture."

Some of the blocks are made more characterful still by still having the knockabout scars, pinholes and drawn markings given them when they were in daily use.

The exhibition is about not only Pelissier's hats but also Pelissier herself and her migrant experience.

"She's a young woman coming from Paris to the [not very sophisticated, foreigner-wary] Melbourne of 1948. So there is the culture shock she would have experienced linked to the skills she had to make these amazing hats. It was her skills that allowed her to undertake the journey across the world."

Hall hopes people will get from the exhibition a sense of how Pelissier's very presence in Melbourne, the contract she was given, reflects the desire felt by Melburnians to make a fashion connection with Paris.

"There was that desire of postwar Australians to get a sense of glamour, a sense of what was happening in fashion in the wider world, to brush off the austerity of the war and to look forward to something beautiful and glamorous."*

And so on to fashionable, beautiful, glamorous and enviable Ainslie.

We say "enviable" because a disproportionate number of our natural history items come from wildlife-blessed Ainslie (and only last week we had the tale of a Tawny Frogmouth on an Ainslie Hills hoist).

Now from Ainslie comes word – and pictures – of Antonio, a large male kangaroo who ensconces himself in Ainslie gardens. He is doing it in the same endearing way, loyal readers will remember, that Gary the kangaroo used to. Gary was famous and much-loved in Ainslie and this column, assisted by our Ainslie correspondents, ran several items about and photographs of him. He, alas, has since gone, bounding, to his Great Reward.

But for quite some time, Ainslie resident Amalia Milman reports, Antonio (she laughs that she calls him that "because he's tall, dark and handsome" and Antonio sounds like a fitting name for a tall, dark, handsome male) has been frequenting front gardens in the radius of about a block.

I confessed to my deep envy of her having an Antonio in her garden. Lots of us have kangaroos in our suburbs (the tedium of my own suburb of Garran is often relieved by having kangaroos bound through its margins) but it is rare for us to have kangaroos that adopt us and loll about in our gardens. It seems, from the examples of Gary and Antonio, that perhaps to have a kangaroo becalmed in one's garden is a special blessing vouchsafed on enviable Ainslie.

*The mini-exhibition of the Andree Pelissier hat collection goes on display later today, Thursday, in the Journeys Collection at the National Museum of Australia.