Do other migrants, those who didn't arrive in this promised land until they were at least in their teens, find it impossible to take kangaroos for granted? Perhaps it was because I was a rural pommy and grew up in a world of run-of-the-mill hedgehogs, commonplace badgers and unremarkable voles, that somehow the sheer strangeness of kangaroos never lessens. It is no wonder that the best poem ever written about kangaroos was written not by an Australian but by 'roo-bedazzled pommy novelist and poet D.H. Lawrence. He met and knew kangaroos at Thirroul during his brief (three months) sojourn in Australia in 1922.

She watches with insatiable wistfulness.Untold centuries of watching for something to come,For a new signal from life, in that silent lost land of theSouth.Where no bull roared, no cow ever lowed, no stag cried,no leopard screeched, no lion coughed, no dog barked,But all was silent save for parrots occasionally, in thehaunted blue bush.

John Bundock also contributes a reminiscence in the wake of our item earlier this week about how paper boying is now a lost profession, like lamplighting and molecatching. We ran a picture of a cluster of paper boys outside a Civic newsagent in 1974.

"We moved into Kambah in January 1975. The Smyth family had a newsagency in Weston Creek. They operated a newsagency in Kambah, from a converted bus. Their son, Brendan, was our paperboy. Now Brendan Smyth MLA."

Mention of impressively big things (our Goliath of a kangaroo) brings us nimbly to the biggest story of recent days the publication of the very big Chilcot Report.

It is Sir John Chilcot's probe into how Tony Blair (much-accused then and since of being President Bush's "poodle") took the UK into the Iraq War. Some of Blair's "poodle" accusers were unkind enough to make comic images of him and today, astonishing ourselves with our tastelessness, we publish one of them.

Your columnist, a prodigious reader of books (showing my age because this good habit dates from the days before new-fangled television arrived to compete with books) has been amused by media reporting that greeted the publication of the Chilcot Report. So much of the reporting, even on usually-fairly-intelligent ABC Radio National, opened not with what the report contains but with expressions of amazement at just how big the report is. Again and again news reports gasped that Chilcot's opus contained two millions words is "four times as long as War and Peace".

These were the gasps of young(ish) journalists who are living in tweeting and texting times and for whom a long read must seem as unimaginable, as daunting, as a long climb up Mount Everest.

If the Chilcot Report is four times as long as War and Peace then it must be about 18 times as long as Hugh Watson's still quite burly novel (353 pages) Home Grown.

The new book (Hugh Watson tells us it is "a political-action thriller...that asks 'how would Australia respond to a series of devastating terror attacks?' " may have a special interest for Canberrans because so much of it is set here in our dear metropolis. We are still so young a city that there is still a great novelty about this, whereas the folk of Moscow and Saint Petersburg (settings for War and Peace and for so many great novels) probably couldn't care less.

Many Canberra places and events get a mention in Home Grown, although somehow my own dear suburb of Garran is cruelly ignored. I know I speak for everyone in Garran when I say how we live in hope that Garran places and objects will be gathered into the embrace of the Pokemon Go craze.

But Canberra places that do get a mention in Home Grown include Lake Burley Griffin:

"[With the nation in crisis] the Governor-General looked out from the generous windows of Government House over the still waters of Yarramundi Reach. He could see crews lining up to row down the course that led from his front lawn to the finish line some 1800 metres away."

Then four distinguished guests arrive for an unpublicised dinner over which they discuss the plight of the nation. No sooner have the plates of the first course (it is duck consomme) been taken away than their dark and urgent discussions begin.

Another place that gets a mention, perhaps at Garran's expense, is the suburb of Ainslie. Hero Will Andrews (a troubled Iraq War veteran) lives there in a "three-bedroom ex-government house". Some mornings, "when he didn't have to start work to early he could run around the 12-kilometre base of Mount Ainslie".

What becomes of Will, this bounding athlete, this troubled Iraq veteran? Does he hold a grudge against John Howard, who Paul Keating says "should be hanging his head in shame" for being what John Pilger called George W. Bush's "other poodle" over the Iraq War? What becomes of Will's imperilled Australia?

Those of you who can cope with a book this big will find it published on Amazon/Kindle and will find some hard copies at the National Library's bookshop and at the Muse Bookshop.