We reported that Charles Landry (another perturbá´tour), the ''critical friend'' of cities, is in Canberra again (his fourth visit in the last 10 years) and how at a Monday gathering he said that he's always wondered why Canberra is so white.

Now an environmental engineer leaps to tell us that ''the answer to your question lies in the National Capital Plan''.

He has sent us passages from the plan. So for example ''Civic Centre Townscape Conditions'' stipulate ''Buildings in Civic shall be of permanent construction and generally white to light buff/grey in colour … In addition, the use of colour or materials in external facades other than in the white to grey colour range shall be considered where, in the National Capital Planning Authority's view … the coloured elements are subsidiary to the main white to light buff/grey materials.

''While colours which would be at odds with the overall intentions of [light-coloured] unity and harmony are not favoured, consideration will be given to the use of bright or contrasting colour for accent or relief in a metal facade … ''

And we find this rainbow-resisting bias elsewhere in the plan. So for example the ''Special Requirements For Main Avenues'' stipulate that ''external materials should be predominantly light in tone''. The ''Kingston Foreshore - Special Requirements'' insist that ''the colour scheme of development is to be generally light in tone. Some highlighting with darker colours may be acceptable where these do not present the dominant colour scheme when viewed from or across the lake''.

The latter explains why the Kingston Foreshore development looks, from a distance, and not unpleasingly, like a ghostly development, built not so much of stone and metal as ectoplasm.

On this trip Landry has seen a little Canberra colour at last (in the revolutionary airport precinct) and he'll find some more in the cheerfully red, orange and blue ANU UniLodge residence buildings in Civic. How their designers got the designs past the city's Ectoplasm Police is a mystery.

And, as if on cue to help make Landry's point for him, Canberra's already extreme whiteness is being unusually augmented at the moment. Alert ornithologists tell us of the presence of an unusually large group (perhaps 100 fowls) of all-white cattle egrets at the Jerrabomberra Wetlands, just across the river from Duntroon.

Don't tell the opposition spokeswoman on the environment, Nicole Lawder, because she will call for their extermination (just as she demanded the extermination of the koel), but these striking-looking birds, these stocky herons, were not always native Australians. They were first recorded in Australia in the late 1940s, having somehow begun to show an interest in us in the wake of the establishment of buffalo and other cattle in Northern Australia. They've since spread to eastern Australia and can often be found, living up to their common name, wherever there are cattle.

They eat the insects and small vertebrate prey disturbed by the ground-churning hooves of these animals.

Geoffrey Dabb, who took some pictures of the Jerrabomberra Wetland egrets and their black and beautiful bovine chums, says that egrets hang about the cattle often within a metre or two of the grazing beasts' heads.

''But when there is tall grass as at the flats of the moment [after all this rain] they will perch on the backs or head of the cows either to rest, or as a vantage point.''

Look closely at the picture and you'll see Parliament House's flagpole looming artistically in the far distance while in the foreground some egrets are standing on one cow's beefy back.

*This week embraces the day of the publication in 1755 of Dr Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language. To mark this birthday we're using some of his dictionary's fine old words. For him a ''Perturbá´tour'' was a ''raiser of commotions''.

There was a sweet passage of history-bridging play in Sunday's Love in the Woods concert of 16th-century music at the Albert Hall played by a consort of sabbathbreakers.*

Giovanni Pierluigi de Palestrina (1525-1599) was with us in spirit, watching, and he saw one of the gentlemen of the recorder ensemble playing one of Palestrina's own compositions from music displayed not on ye olde sheet music but on the early 21st-century device of a tablet computer!

''What's that!'' Palestrina marvelled in our ear, saying he wished there'd been such a thing in his day.

*This week we celebrate the 1755 birthday of the publication of Dr Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language and we note that he had a stern word to describe everybody who played and sang at Sunday's concert. Each of them was a ''sabbathbreaker'', defined by him as a ''violator of the sabbath day by labour or wickedness''.

And (with this next passage containing a Johnson's Dictionary word wherever you see an *) what a contrast of moods Sunday afternoon's genteel concert provided (how we rejoice in our maturing city's diversities!) with the previous night's invigoratingly violent ice-hockey game at Phillip.

There our CBR Brave fought (literally, a lot of the time) with the Newcastle North Stars. The two hostile teams were at daggersdrawing*, adding to the partisan delight of every giddybrained* slubberdegullion* who was there in the blustrous* crowd in that polyacoustick* arena.