Meanwhile, and while with birds, here is as promised yet another of Frank Knight's Magpies of Canberra paintings from his exhibition of that name.*

Thousands of Canberrans have magpies visiting their front doors (in lots of cases to be fed premium, low-fat mince). Here is Frank Knight's painting of a magpie boldly visiting the city's most famous, most august front doors (for magpies care nothing for rank and pomp), the front doors of Parliament House.

Does this magpie have political ambitions? Magpies to Parliament! Once upon a time there was an edition of the Australian Encyclopaedia (we used it for reference at The Canberra Times in the 1980s on those rare occasions when we spoiled a story with a fact) that had the rallying cry "Marsupials to Parliament" embossed on the spine of one of its volumes. Journalists and schoolchildren loved this hot, radical, political idea that government by wombats had to be better than what we were putting up with from, say, Malcolm Fraser's humans.

But back to the birthday lake and to our gulls. In Ashleigh Croxford's photo Chip Inside - Gulls Outside some peckish Canberra gulls are trying to get through a car's windscreen.

For help with a piece about the lake for last Friday's Times this reporter spoke to Canberra ornithologist Chris Davey, an authority on the lake's birdlife. He pointed to a novelty we had no room to report in Friday's essay.

He says that since in recent times the powers that be have cleared almost all of the vegetation from the West Lake's Spinnaker Island, the silver gulls have whooped "Thank you very much!" and have colonised it and are breeding there.

In David Pope's highly collectable 50th Anniversary chart of the lake (on sale at canberratimes.com.au/lake50) Spinnaker Island is "Where the wild things are" and those wild things include, these days, the seagulls. Thank goodness Pope's chart's "Queanbeyan migrating brown trout" seem concentrated elsewhere in the lake.

Davey says that some local gulls used to nest on boats moored at Lotus Bay (to the horror of the yacht-owning classes) but that the new, improved Spinnaker Island is for them a vast improvement. Gulls like flat places so they have a good view of any approaching dangers, and now the government has made Spinnaker Island lawn-like. The species may never have had so good and so successful a colony in the ACT. If we do notice a new abundance of the characterful gulls in and around the city then Spinnaker Island may be the source of it.

To test my thesis, ahead of writing my essay, that this is the most underused lake-beside-a-city in the whole world, I went to a West Lake lookout on Black Mountain Peninsula. It gave a great view of just how gull-teeming Spinnaker Island and the air and the waters around it are. Indeed, the gulls were the only things generating any activity of any kind in the lakescape on a typical Lake Burley Griffin day when not a single human was to be seen breaking up the tedium of the great watery desert.

My essay has attracted lots of criticism (and I am easily bruised), but my observation that we have a lot to learn from other local governments and peoples of the world when it comes to encouraging citizen-lake relationships has received an authoritative endorsement. I mentioned Genevans and Lake Geneva as role models for us and now a discerning and homesick reader writes:

"As a Canberran a long way from home, I enjoyed your piece about the lake and thoroughly agree.

"Having seen lots of European cities in the last 18 months, the one thing that stands out is that they're all connected to their waterways. By contrast, getting to our lake [Lake Burley Griffin] from anywhere, even the city, usually means you need a car. And if you need a car, you need parking, and time to drive there, find a park, and find another park back at your origin, etc. So [at Canberra] we just don't bother. It means there are no opportunities to just "encounter" the lake.

"

* Magpies of Canberra is at the Belconnen Arts Centre from October 22 to November 9.