Daphne's thirst for art

Karen Hindley has taught Daphne to paint. ''She was already predisposed to pick up things her mouth and hold them,'' Hindley explains. And so, using friendly commands rewarded with food treats, Daphne has learned to pick up a paintbrush and daub things on a canvas.

She can't do portraits yet but, like Jackson Pollock in his heyday, she favours abstract expressionism. This columnist met Daphne at Gundaroo on Tuesday. She is adorable (her head, face and plump, expressive lips are a velvety dark brown) and Hindley adores her.

She's sure that camels have intellectual qualities and that ''they like puzzles. They like solving things. They need to be cerebrally active'', and that's why Daphne is encouraged to make her sought-after paintings that, at the end of the show, are auctioned to assist the Hungry Camel Benevolent Fund.

The Outback Show at Gundaroo is on Saturday at 11am and Sunday at 2pm. Bookings 0404 898 587.

There were lots of oldies at Sunday night's Australian Chamber Orchestra performance of Bach's Christmas Oratorio (it was as if hundreds of grey nomads had suspended their roaming to spend a sublime evening in one place) and the most ancient of us was more than 400 years old.

Yes, the venerable bass played by the ACO's Maxime Bibeau is a late 16th-century Gasparo da Salo bass on loan to Bibeau from ''a private Australian benefactor''. What's more, tree-ring analysis has found that some of the wood used for the front of the instrument came from a tree that was growing in 1266. The luthier Gasparo da Salo (1542-1609) was born at Salo on Lake Garda, Brescia, Italy.

The average mind in the dashingly 21st-century Llewellyn Hall on Sunday was surely boggled by the thought that we were in the company of a working artefact so very old that when it was fashioned Shakespeare was still fashioning his plays. And perhaps the instrument was being made or, new and fashionable, was being played by its owner as the fiendish Spanish prepared their Armada for an attempted invasion of England.

Notice how, in this photograph, young Bibeau's smooth complexion contrasts with his dark companion's gnarled old pearwood and sycamore cheek.

John Hargreaves the former MLA and minister of blessed memory and part of the band the Old 45s tells us, ''Now that I've retired I've been wandering through some music stuff I have.''

He's come across a 1965 musical classic and oddity he thinks, and we agree, deserves a little limelight in our centenary year.

It is the song Canberra Blues and the independently-made recording of it by the band the Bitter Lemons. All of the boys of the band (which by the time of the recording had inexplicably jettisoned its catchy and appealing first name the Orgasms) were ANU undergraduates. Lead singer was the late Paul Lyneham, who went on to fame as an ABC TV journalist.

Their recording, complete with some quaint old footage of gum-chewing teenagers dancing moodily in the Albert Hall, is available to all on YouTube.

Not all of the refreshingly Marxist and Canberra-disgruntled (and still spot-on today) lyrics are intelligible (because of course the blues are almost always mumbled, for effect) but the song begins like this:

Come along, people, listen to me.Don't try to find a home down in Canberra,
A C T. It's a bourgeois town
I said, it's a bourgeois town
Got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread that news all around.

In a later verse Lyneham seems to moan that he's found bourgeois Canberra and the search for work there so bruising that he's moved to Goulburn. Then the lugubrious ditty concludes:

Home of the brave, land of the free.
Don't want to be mistreated by the bourgeoisie.
It's a bourgeois town.
Well, it's a bourgeois town.
Got the bourgeois blues.
Gonna spread that news all around.