The raucous game of two-up on the ground at the Canberra Services Club at Manuka yesterday afternoon seemed to attract, in the air above it, more than 100 raucous and quarrelling white sulphur-crested cockatoos.
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When you followed the flight of the three pennies (the ''head'' sides of them polished and brightly gleaming) and looked up into the bright blue patch of sky, the cockatoos were there too.
What with all that human and feathered action (the several hundred humans outnumbering the roughly 100 fowls of the air) one had a strong sense of being where all the Anzac Day action was.
The human throng, bemedalled and partying, was remarkable when you consider that there is no Canberra Services Club building any longer. It burned down almost exactly a year ago today. Who would have thought that as many servicemen and women, serving and retired, would go to the old club's site yesterday as used to go to it on Anzac Day afternoons when there was a building to go to?
There is obviously a spirit of the place even while it's a bare and empty place (although yesterday there was a big, teeming, temporary bar inside a marquee and of course a two-up arena set up outside) and while we wait for the new club building to be started.
The old building had gone up in 1946, but long before that there had been a kind of community hut there.
''The Canberra Services Club has got this huge tradition,'' club board member Wendy Parsons explained yesterday while in the background the throng mingled and milled and sipped beers, their medals glinting in the dazzlingly bright sunlight.
The old club was so very special, Parsons said, with such a unique community ambience that the place it stood on remains dear to many people. She said yesterday that she and others had been determined not to let an Anzac Day go by without traditional Anzac Day events continuing there.
A new building is coming. For the time being the club, in keeping with its battling spirit, is being administered from a demountable in the car park of an obliging local bowling club.
Two-up is very bewildering for those of us who don't understand it. But the excitement it causes among its players and spectators tells you (just like it tells you when you go to your first, bewildering game of American football and see the high emotions of its devotees) that something very worthwhile, very nuanced is going on.
Yesterday all the players were brandishing fistfuls of banknotes and waving them at players elsewhere in the throng: ''$20 on tails! $20 on tails!'' someone would invite, and someone across the way would oblige them by joining in the wager.
The ''spinner'' would launch the three venerable pennies into the air from the ''kip'' and then yesterday's ''ringer'', the statuesque Roland Trebesius, would stride across to where they'd fallen. A showman, he would prolong the terrible suspense (were there two heads or two tails?) by putting a finger to his lips and telling the crowd to ''Shhhhh!'' as if any noise might somehow disturb the sleeping pennies and disrupt the outcome of their fall. Then, dramatically, he would either put his two enormous hands on top of his suspiciously authentic-looking broad-brimmed bush hat to indicate a ''heads'' or clap them to his bottom to indicate a ''tails''.
The description ''statuesque'' has been devalued by overuse, but not overuse by me, and so I use it to describe Trebesius, who is very tall and broad. He is is a groundsman at the Australian War Memorial.
I am writing kind things about him here, turning the other cheek, even though when we were introduced yesterday he exclaimed, aware of my far too prolonged career in Canberra journalism: ''Ian Warden! My God, you're still alive! Congratulations.''
The three old coins he was using yesterday were, he explained: ''Edwards'' or ''baldies''. It emerges that they've always been called ''baldies'' because of the way, minted in 1907, they bear on the ''heads'' side the face and spectacularly bald head of King Edward VII (monarch from 1901-1910). Irreverent diggers couldn't resist poking fun at the not-very-majestic baldness of His Majesty's head. Why the old coins?
''One of the things I feel,'' Trebesius reflected yesterday, ''is that this is a traditional game and these particular coins would have been the very same ones the original Anzacs, the diggers, would have been using''.
The wind whistled through the trees around the club yesterday and the air was full of flying autumn leaves and flying cockatoos.
What the cockatoos were calling was a mystery, but between them the men and the birds created an exciting Anzac Day afternoon cacophony.
