Friday's column frightened readers with Rhys Hulkkonnen's big (2m x 1.5m) portrait of Vladimir Putin, the bogeyman of the moment, the Red under all of our beds. But the Step Into The Limelight exhibition that the giant Putin rather dominates (his eyes follow you all round the gallery), a show of the works of more than 300 students from more than 30 different ACT public schools, also boasts lots of tiny but exquisite works.
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Here from the exhibition is one of them, Esraa Mahmoud's photograph Self Portrait. Ms Mahmoud, of year 12 at Erindale College is proud of her Islamic, Egyptian background (she is visiting Egypt as we speak) and here she is with a colourful raffia bowl made in her home Egyptian region of Aswan.
Step Into The Limelight continues at the ANU School Of Art until August 9.
Eagle porn
Wednesday's shyly pornographic, PGR-rated column featured photographer Kym Bradley's picture of two wedge-tailed eagles engaged in (blush) sexual intercourse.
This item fitted into our occasional series devoted to portraying ACT Nature as, alas, the often wild and nasty thing it is, contrary to the common portrayal of it (especially by suburban artists) as a kind of romper room full of cuddly soft toys.
As the photographer reported, throughout the whole lustful transaction the pragmatic female held on to the remains of a rabbit. Then, post-transaction, she flew away with her bedraggled meal, and here is Bradley's photograph of that.
Rejoice, readers, that our Territory is blessed with such creatures and that they are reproducing themselves! Kym Bradley saw this pair on a tree beside the road to Tharwa, not far from the entrance to the Lanyon estate.
NIMBY's paradise
Last Monday's publication here of a famous rap artist's song (his chart-topping NIMBY's Paradise) about the change-resisting burghers of Yarralumla and Deakin, has got other rap artists intrigued.
Exotic foreigners (mostly US citizens of colour with names like Jay-Z) are contacting me for background to the topic so that they too can write songs and rise to the challenge of finding words to rhyme with Yarralumla. Endearingly, all are calling me "dude" and "bro".
But they're mystified, my bros admit, by why anyone living in a desirable but underpopulated (about 3200) and moribund First World paradise like Yarralumla, would resist the injection of colour, movement and throbbing diversity that the proposed 4000 new souls would bring. They wonder why residents associations are not actively wooing changes like these instead of fighting them?
Dudes, I tell the inquiring rappers, you're preaching to the converted in my case.
Then I go on to tell them (and I invite the knickers-knotted burghers of Yarralumla and Deakin to pay attention to this so as to be comforted by it) that extreme NIMBYism is only a passing phase that lots of over-anxious First World Canberrans go through.
A designated ACT Living Treasure, I've lived in and observed this city for a very long time and am a veteran student of Canberra NIMBYism (the best in the world). I've seen 1000 times how NIMBYs, when first reacting to the horror of proposed change, paint wild pictures of the catastrophes that will result if proposed changes to their neighbourhoods are allowed to happen. But then when the change goes ahead anyway (when governments grow a spine and resist NIMBY nonsense) in a short time it's found that there hasn't been a catastrophe after all.
So for example the imaginative people of a district in (upper) Kambah argued they'd all be murdered in their beds and their property values decimated if a halfway house for plucky recovering alcoholics was set up anywhere near them. The relevant minister of the day rose above their hard-hearted piffle and the project went ahead and life in the neighbourhood remained as idyllic as ever.
Yarralumla (and Deakin) catastrophists are at that hyperbolic political stage now. They prophesy crime and a "ghetto" in a hell-like "mega-suburb". Yarralumla, at the moment one of the most paradisiacal places on earth (about an 8.5 on the 10-point Paradise Scale), will still be a First World paradise when and if the Brickworks plan is accomplished. Today's Yarralumla and Deakin Catastrophists-In-Chief will then be ashamed of themselves that they didn't invest all of this political energy in Christian ways and on behalf of the wretched of the earth of the Second and Third worlds.
Meanwhile those of us us who live in any of Canberra's several shrivelling suburbs (for example the 2009 ACT Population Projections for suburbs and districts shows that by 2019 my already thinly-populated suburb of Garran will have dwindled down to just 3,150 souls) can only look on in envy at lucky Yarralumla's promised injection of new folk and the life and the vitality they will impart.
