This one is a star of Robin Ezra's and Annie Day's current Magpies to Monoprints exhibition at the Strathnairn Homestead, continuing until 19 October. It is Robin Ezra's Beady Eyes and shows a magpie with that maniacal look in its eyes familiar to almost all Canberrans.

Ezra and Day are the Printmaking Sisters and their exhibition features not only prints of magpies but postcards of magpies (different species from our own) from around the world.

Is Canberra the best place, the best city in the world? The OECD, using nine measurements of bestness, says that Canberra is the closest thing to earthly paradise and of course Canberrans, many of them too young or too insular to have seen much else of the world, let alone to have lived elsewhere, have been quick to baa baa their agreement with the OECD.

But the OECD's measurements of bestness are mostly (not entirely) measurements of material degrees of bourgeois smugness and contentment when, perhaps, to say that a city is the best should be a statement about its character. Character is a very difficult thing to measure, and certainly can't be measured in the ways the OECD measures a city. Quite what if anything the average income of a city's citizens (one of the OECDs measurements) says about that city's character is unclear. Is Canberra really a "better" city than, say, characterful Glasgow or stimulating St Petersburg, where there are disparities of income and of life expectancy not dreamt of in Canberra?

And Canberra has some significant flaws. Canberrans themselves are a particular disappointment. I have never felt that Canberrans are good enough for Canberra and many years ago came up with a brilliant idea, inexplicably never taken up by governments: I wondered if some of the fun-loving smaller cities of the world might come to a kind of population-rotating arrangement by which, perhaps every 10 years, the population of one city moves to another. My dream was that we might replace the 250,000 rich, white whingers usually in Canberra with, say, 250,000 people of a second or third world city, overjoyed to come here and to impart their special colour and movement to a white and bourgeois city that had become jaded and stagnant, like Lake Burley Griffin.

Yes, Canberrans, though improving all the time (our ice hockey fans are my brothers and sisters), are often bourgeois, smug, conservative, pedantic, progress-resisting and unkind (Canberra's NIMBYs can display a chilling callousness).

Some of us, and especially the virtuoso bores who write reactionary Letters to the editor of this paper, have lived in Canberra for far too long. A fine writer who knew he had lived in Los Angeles for far too long mused that southern California is the kind of place where you sit down beside the pool and bask in the sun and then, when you get up out of your deckchair, you find you have been sitting in it for 30 years! Canberra is a bit like that. It is such a cosy, unperturbing city to live in (as the OECD keeps measuring) that it seduces and hypnotises. Suddenly one counts the years and finds one has been embedded here, basking, snoozing for half a lifetime.

Given my life all over again, and equipped from the start with the great warehouses of wisdom a thinking chap accumulates over 68 years, I would never come anywhere near Canberra. It is a featherbed, a hammock strung between trees in the dappled shade of a summer, bee-buzzing garden. I would live in a difficult and sometimes exasperating city (like Melbourne, New York, Chicago, Glasgow, Shanghai, St Petersburg) where from week to week there are stimulating experiences of civic rapture and of civic exasperation as opposed to Canberra's 365/12 bland, bourgeois mellowness.

In almost 40 years of being embedded in deeply-upholstered Canberra I have always, as a perturbator, made a point of interrogating Canberrans who say they love Canberra to explain what it is they love about their city. When you do this, 99 out of the 100 Canberrans you quiz will nominate, in their first breath, the ease of getting from place to place (usually in their late-model Peugeots).

But what they are calling, when they say this, love of the city, isn't love at all. It is only a mention of something that gives satisfaction. When New Yorkers, Glaswegians and St Petersburgians say they love their cities it's never a matter of how easy they find the city to criss-cross. True love of a city feels, I testify, (for there are some cities I love, warts and all, and Canberra is one of them, wishing it had more warts, more grunge) very like true, passionate, irrational love of a flawed, chaotic human. But Canberrans only think of their city as a kind of urban and suburban mechanism that works terribly, reliably well, like a late-model Peugeot. Magpies know how flawed we Canberrans are, and that is why they sometimes fix us with angry stares.