It's not that there's anything monstrous about the affable man from Utah, but like Revenge (the truck that does spectacular leaps and crushes cars) he is exceptionally burly. In physique he is like the spectacularly big and bulging tyres on one of the trucks.

On Thursday, for the media, he took Revenge for a brief burst along one of the roads at Exhibition Park In Canberra (EPIC), a route that took him past the Gummeroo Pavilion where hitherto sleeping cattle woke in fright.

For when revved up, Revenge makes angry, roaring, snarling noises that would wake the dead let alone living Murray greys. Human heads, too, swivelled on shoulders at the sound and then at the spectacle. Making a sharp and surprisingly nimble turn about, Revenge, raging, sent up a cloud of the traditional show dust already coming along nicely at EPIC in spite of Wednesday's epic rains.

''They belong to EMT Events in Sydney,'' Christensen explained earlier, gesturing at the juggernauts, ''and I build 'em and maintain 'em for them and I spend about 22 weeks a year here in Australia. But home is Willard, Utah.''

He'll drive both trucks at the show but it's the evocatively named Revenge that will do the theatrical things.

''It's the truck built for crushing cars and performing. It's a 2007 stadium truck with a Chevrolet body. It's powered by a 540 cubic inch Merlin, also a Chevrolet. The motor is 1500 horsepower. It's built to do nothing but jump, go fast, go big.''

Crushing cars must be enormous fun, this reporter fancied, yearning to borrow Revenge to do it in my own street in Garran.

''Yes, it's a kind of stress reliever. You go out and relieve all your stress. But the favourite part for me is the new people that come to see us, the little kids and the adults. It doesn't matter where I travel in the world, the Monster Truck fans are the best there are. The biggest thing for them is that this is a five-tonne vehicle and yet we throw it through the air. What we do with it is just astounding to people. That you can do that with so heavy a vehicle.''

Then he took Revenge, going fast, going big, on its short but head-turning, bull-startling, bulldust-raising rampage.

■ The ActewAGL Royal Canberra Show is at EPIC from Friday until Sunday.

Jacqueline Bradley's Travelling Shoes (2014) is one of the slightly disturbing delights of the Safe Passage exhibition that is coming to the Australian National Capital Artists (ANCA) gallery at Dickson.

She tells us that she likes the idea that when people look at Travelling Shoes ''you see something that at first looks very sensible and looks as if it should function, but then you see that it's futile''.

Shoes and suitcases are essential to travel but in this case they've somehow combined to thwart it. ''My work'' she laughs ''can be like this, ''with a bit of humour, a bit of weirdness. A bit sad and a bit hopeless.'' Safe Passage, with new works by Canberra-based artists Bradley, Karen Cromwell, Hanna Hoyne and Amelia Zaraftis, opens on February 26. Details at www.anca.net.au

Wednesday's item about the April 1953 early morning fire that gutted the Melbourne Building in Civic, in spite of the best efforts of milkmen and of volunteers in pyjamas manning the hoses to assist the six firemen, has triggered lots of memories for older readers. That fire has been on our minds, of course, because of this week's blaze in the Melbourne Building's twin, the Sydney Building.

In 1953 the Canberra University College was a Melbourne Building tenant. As mentioned on Wednesday one of the volunteer firefighters was famous Canberra identity Leslie Finlay 'Fin' Crisp, professor of political science, who joined in the firefighting (manning a hose) but only after he had earlier found a ladder and (surely with more desperate derring-do than common sense) had somehow clambered into the blazing building.

It emerges that what he saved (phew!) were irreplaceable typed manuscripts and papers of his work-in-progress history of the Labor Party and biography of Ben Chifley, both duly published in 1955 and 1961 respectively.

This columnist knew 'Fin' in the early 1970s. I can remember some of us chortling to ourselves about his fixation with the old Childers Street buildings on the campus being ''A bloody fire trap'' that ought to be demolished, irrespective of any supposed heritage value they might have. Now, learning of his extreme brush with fire in 1953, his later sensitivity to Childers Street's highly combustible wooden and fibreboard buildings makes rational sense.