Treasures to emerge include a series of 50 images he took when he was a member of the 4th Canberra Baptist Scouts. They were taken during the troop's camping trips to the Cotter River between 1932 and 1935.

The same 4th Canberra Baptist Scouts attended the Great Australian Jamboree of 1934-1935 (held at a bushland bayside site at Frankston, Victoria it was on the scale of a Hollywood biblical epic) and Robert McJannett's collection has images, too, from that extravaganza.

Our picture decorating today's column is one of those. These admirable males representing the flower of the malehood of the young federal capital city!

One of the Cotter River camping pictures shows a scout juxtaposed with the entrance to the Cotter Tunnel (finished in 1915, it has a concrete panel above it proclaiming that date) from which a major pipe is emerging. It is said that once upon a time (when Canberra offered fewer things to do) a walk through the tunnel was a popular rite of passage. We would love to hear from plucky Canberrans who braved what looks from Robert McJannett's photograph a dark, confined, bat-infested thing.

Robert McJannett has lived in Canberra for 90 years. The first Canberra scouts began in the year he was born, 1917. And at 99 he is not very much younger than scouting itself. Scouting, invented by Lord Baden Powell, will be 110 next year.

At that first scout camp in England in August 1907 boys engaged in wholesome activities. They were based (Wikipedia tells us) "around camping, observation, woodcraft, chivalry and patriotism". Isn't it time, readers, to revive for our boys that character-building suite of interests?

Sensitive students of the Great Australian Jamboree (scouts of other nations were there too, adding exoticism) will envy Robert McJannett his opportunity to attend it. It all sounds like enormous fun, and often spectacular fun too, with gatherings and pageants involving many thousands of scouts and sometimes also legions of Guides, Brownies and Cubs. Guest of honour was the Chief Scout of the World, Lord Baden Powell.

Scouts like to gather around campfires (don't we all, for it touches something prehistoric in our souls) and at the Great Jamboree there was on the night of December 30, 1934 the "devotional gathering" of a grand General Campfire. The man from The Age was deeply impressed. He reckoned there were 40,000 there. They surely included a lucky Robert McJannett and his Canberra troop.

"When the floodlights were put out," The Age marvelled, "the entire amphitheatre immediately became a dazzling semi-circle of thousands of electric [battery] torches, which were moved rhythmically to an fro as the vast throng sang famous Scout camp-fire songs".

Lord Baden Powell read them a message of greeting from the Prince of Wales.

Then, The Age rejoiced, "The St Paul's choir [of Melbourne], under the direction of Dr A. E. Floyd, sang Christmas carols so beautifully ... and shortly after 10 o'clock one of the finest, and certainly the greatest, of truly scouty campfires came to a close."

Oh to have been there!

Scouting has always erred on the side of decency, and everyone who swam at the Jamboree (it was hot summer, the waters were inviting, hessian changing sheds were erected on the beach) had to wear the decorous swimsuits that covered not only a chap's rude bits but also his torso. Those new-fangled and controversial trunks were expressly forbidden. In photographs of massed swimmers every scout is decorously dressed.

On the weekends your columnist is often decorously (but showily) dressed in a bright green and yellow top. It displays the legend "I may live in Australia, but on match days my heart is with Norwich City - the Canaries."

One day last week the usual bitterness of the letters page was broken up by a kindly letter urging critics of this columnist to be gentle with me because Norwich City FC had just been relegated from the English Premier League. The correspondent knew that this would be causing me distress.

That is a matter for me and my grief counsellor. Meanwhile, though, the tragedy of the Canaries' latest relegation moves me to think what extra drama it would add to Australian football competitions if the UK systems of promoting and relegating applied here.

For extreme fans of UK soccer (a piece of cultural baggage that came with me when I migrated) the prospects of promotion and the dreads of relegation give that fandom a powerful, Shakespearean quality.

After all, life itself for all of us is full of promotions and relegations. Life begins with a promotion (our birth) and ends with the relegation of death. In between, most of us live lives full of True Life relegations. Lovers dump us, employers throw us on the scrap heap of redundancy.

Football fandom in Australia simply lacks this soul-involving, true-to-life dimension. If the Raiders finish bottom of the competition it causes Raiders' fans only temporary, minor bruising of the soul. Fans know that a new season will mean a fresh start in the same tournament.

It is not like that with UK football. Hearts get broken. It is all very heaven and hellish and religious, which is why at matches UK football crowds sing songs set to hymn tunes.