What's this sinister-looking thing? Looks like a state-of-the-art weapons system of some kind.
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Right first time! Photographer Mel Edwards identifies it as a missile system just seen in a North Korean military parade and a weapon the North Koreans brag is representing "The Highest Stage of the Development of our Revolutionary Armed Forces with Extraordinary Sagacity, Outstanding Art of Command, and Matchless Pluck.''
But then she goes on to reveal in her teasing gallery/blog ''Nah [no], It's Canberra'' that, ''Nah [no] it's Skywhale's tail.''
Edwards' blog, often praised here because of its fond portrayal of our city's diversities, quirks and complexities, is her gallery (added to almost every day) of her photographs of a contrary Canberra. Her Canberra is lurking just behind the Canberra we think we see and know, or is down one of the city's seldom-travelled alleyways or footpaths.
She is right, too, to have found something sinister and military in the Skywhale. For some of us it seems as likely to attack us, squirting bombs and rockets from its spine-chilling Cold War nipples, as to bombard us with charm.
Edwards' blog is an important source of information about our city for people not lucky enough to live in Australia let alone in Canberra. She says her site has been visited, as of Thursday, by folk from 90 nations. And far-flung and homesick Canberrans are especially fond of the site, she tells us.
''Occasionally I've had requests - which I don't tend to do - but one of the sweetest came from a guy called Raphael Kabo, who's in London. He said the site helped cure his homesickness. And then asked for Skywhale. So I just had to [editing a pic by Ele Saclier].''
One cool cat, fat or not
Just days after the Canberra Times front-page story that ''PS pay growth outstrips nation - typical federal bureaucrat on $105,000'', reader John Moulis has written to us about ''fat cats''.
''Since you have been running features about Canberra's centenary I thought you might be interested in this picture taken in 1985. Your paper did a story about the Canberra T-shirts featuring tourist icons distributed by the Chamber of Commerce in 1977, but does anybody remember these T-shirts which were popular in the mid 1980s?
'''Canberra - Fat Cat Territory' might not be conducive to promoting the city's image - in fact you made sure not to wear the T-shirts outside of Canberra - but they seemed to embody what most people thought about the place.
'''Fat Cats' was the term invented by Whitlam cabinet minister Clyde Cameron in the early 1970s to describe public servants, usually senior ones.
''This photo is also a significant period piece, featuring as it does a young man [an unknown tradie/handsome T-shirt model] sporting a very 1980s mullet.''
Gentleman Bert takes his 21st-century stance
Cricket, lovely cricket! The fact of our troubled and unsuccessful Test cricketers being so much in the news (they get into scuffles in bars and now a pugnacious new coach, Darren Lehmann, has been adopted on the eve of the Ashes series) coincides with the National Archives of Australia's digitisation of a fascinating old cricketing document. It is a 1925 application by Bert Oldfield (1894-1976), arguably our greatest wicketkeeper, for registration of his revolutionary new design for wicket-keeping gloves. By 1925 he was already not only Australia's Test wicket-keeper (a position he held until 1938) but also a successful businessman with his own Sydney sports store. No doubt these gloves were eventually sold there.
Special wicketkeeping gloves may have been uncommon and primitive and not very protective of a keeper's precious and vulnerable hands before the knowledgeable Oldfield invented these ones. The legend with the design rego diagrams explains that these proposed gloves have necessary paddings and protections galore for the palms, thumbs and wrists, evolution not having anticipated our species ever needing to keep wicket.
Today, Bert, known as ''the gentleman in gloves,'' would be eligible for today's Test team in matters of talent, but his personality and character would probably disqualify him in Lehmann's blokey and pragmatic eyes.
Oldfield's biographer reports that the quiet, dapper Bert was a teetotaller (and so would never be available to go out a bonding with his teammates and get into fights in the early hours). Worse still, he had the perverse principle of only appealing when he believed a batsman was really, truly out. That would be thought unmanly and disloyal (to the team) today.
The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.