Back to that investigating eagle in a moment but first we report that last Friday there was a ceremony in Blamey Square (where the memorial stands) at which a new plaque was unveiled by the Secretary of the Department of Defence, Mr Dennis Richardson and the United States Ambassador to Australia, His Excellency John Berry.

The new plaque pays tribute to the sacrifice of American men and women in the defence of Australia and in the war in the Pacific 1941-45. It also commemorates the construction of the memorial in 1953 and its eventual completion in 1954.

And to coincide with Friday's event the Department of Defence released unto The Canberra Times some quaint old 1953 and 1954 photographs of the memorial under construction. Some of them feature the eventually-to-be-disgraced Richard Nixon, pressing the flesh of those building the monument.*

Almost none of us, unless we're eagles, ever get a close look at the stylised eagle that crowns the memorial and so here is a pre-hoisting-aloft close-up photograph of its noble profile. The gentleman seen in profile beside it (and doesn't he look eerily like the eagle!) is the memorial's Australian designer Richard M. Ure. The eagle, standing on a globe with its giant talons (which we never see) spread across it, was developed by sculptor Paul Beadle. Eagle and globe together weigh 3000 kilograms.

But back to the aforementioned real eagle.

The man from The Canberra Times who was at the February 1954 unveiling (and with, in the great and continuing tradition of this newspaper's reporters, nothing escaping his eagle eye) noticed how before the arrival of Her Majesty the Queen and her dear husband, a wedge-tailed eagle came down and flew around its sculpted counterpart.

Whether it was endorsing the new feature or simply investigating it, it got a far better view of the sculpture than any enjoyed by anyone earthbound at the memorial's base. The memorial is a towering beast of 79 metres. The Canberra Times reported that Her Majesty "looked a diminutive figure" as she unveiled the plaque fixed to the lowest flanks of Australia's soaring tribute to the Americans who contributed to the defence of Australia in WWII.

How many of us knew, until the Department's timely release of these photographs of the memorial's construction, that the column is not a solid thing (we'd imagined it being like a giant concrete lamppost) but is a kind of honeycomb of ribs and staircases, clad with aluminium? It is daintier than most of us can have imagined. Look closely at our photograph of the uncannily raptor-looking Richard Ure posed with the eagle sculpture. The structure you see behind them is a stretch of the actual skeleton/honeycomb of the column, still awaiting its sheets of aluminium cladding.

The Times thought that "more than 4000 people" were there on a day of "brilliant sunshine" to watch the young Queen (apparently unnerved by the glare) unveil the memorial's plaque.

The 4000 heard something undignified but amusing. The reverent Times chose not to report it but for some reason at the occasion God Save the Queen was played at (only roughly) the same time by two poorly synchronised bands, the City Band and a naval band. Historian Eric Sparke records that "The naval band finished like some lagging echo, three bars behind, causing Prince Philip to remark to an unamused chief of the naval staff that 'There's the navy, coming in a poor second'."

The Times didn't report that, but to its credit didn't present the Queen's 1954 visit to Canberra as a flawless fairytale. So for example on that same action-packed day of the aforementioned unveiling the Queen went to a rally of 17,000 children, of which, while they waited for her, 842 fainted, the paper reported with that legendary precision the Times still supplies today.

The Times also reported Canberrans behaving badly, the way some Canberra royalists always do whenever royalty is at hand. On one unsavoury occasion, the Times reported, royalist Canberra fishwives shrilled and shrieked abuse at a journalist who was spoiling their view of the Queen. Alas, the offending "journalist" turned out to be a visibly upset (she'd probably never heard language like it) Lady Alice Edgerton, lady-in-waiting to the Queen.

A policeman intervened. He told the fishwives who their target was and they promptly buttoned-up their wild colonial lips.