There was so much going on in the teeming-with-children great Hall of the National Museum of Australia on Tuesday (big and glittering exhibits, films flickering on giant screens) that the children didn't even notice when the scariest character in the whole of opera walked among them. It was the Queen of the Night, the super witch, the menacing chiller of spines (''The vengeance of Hell boils in my heart!'' she rages in her great aria) in Mozart's The Magic Flute.
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Even though the columnist knew it was only the approachable, educated-in-Canberra Kate Rafferty in the queen's costume she will wear during the coming production of the opera in Canberra, I kept my distance. Tall and imperious, she strode into the museum's Glorious Days: Australia 1913 exhibition and sat on the moon.
More of the queen on the moon in a moment, but first we muse that with Canberrans probably the most prosperous citizens on Earth, it's no wonder that our First World picnics can look really rather banquety. Carl Rafferty, who is staging The Magic Flute in front of an indoor audience of picnickers (''We provide the white linen and silver candelabras, and people bring their own banquets'') got the idea from seeing outdoor picnicking Canberrans in action.
''I put on a production at Stage 88 a few years ago and in the interval I was wandering around and I noticed that people had turned up with elaborate picnic table settings. I walked past one party's set up and they'd even put a fountain in the middle of the table. A battery-powered water fountain!''
From all this he got the idea that Canberra ''people want to show off a little'' with their picnicking and so it has come to pass that he sets up indoor-picnic/banquet concerts in the Albert Hall.
''People bring the most extravagant dinners, sometimes eight courses!'' he marvelled.
Yes, the Queen of the Night/Kate Rafferty was sitting on the moon on Tuesday to have her photograph taken. The explanation of why is a little complex, but this column's readers have superior attention spans, so here we go.
First, there's the fact that in many productions of the tune-rich opera the Queen of the Night has such power over the night that the moon (a big, new, sickle-shaped one) follows her around, faithfully, like her servant. For a major YouTube treat enter ''Diana Damrau as Queen of the Night'' and you'll find this phenomenon displayed. The moon and the Queen arrive and depart together.
Then there's the fact that the Glorious Days show features a replica of a moon, just like Diana Damrau's big, obedient one, that adorned a fairground at Melbourne's Luna Park in the olden days and on which people sat to have their photograph taken. Now, one person who did just that, probably in 1927, was Kate Rafferty's great-grandmother Mary Kathleen Middenway, then 18. On Tuesday, that precious family photograph was on hand as Kate Rafferty for nostalgia's sake (her great-grandmother was to become her first music teacher and sang her specially composed children's songs) and for some cross-promotion of The Magic Flute and of Glorious Days sat on the moon in exactly the way her great-grandmother had at Luna Park in the glorious days.
The Magic Flute is at the Albert Hall from Friday 3 May to Sunday 5 May (tickets at carlrafferty@bigpond.com) and Glorious Days continues at the National Museum until 13 October.
Time sensitive request
"The only reason for time,'' Einstein explained, ''is so that everything doesn't happen at once.'' Yes, there wasn't time for everything in Tuesday's column which is why we left until Wednesday the request of the Canberra chapter of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors for help in finding out which is the oldest public clock in Canberra and our region?
The NAWCC defines a public clock as ''a clock in a public space that might be a turret or tower clock [surely like the one on the tower of the School of Art at the ANU] or a clock such as the long case clock at the top of the marble staircase in New Parliament House''. The NAWCC is holding a watch and clock display at the Canberra Irish Club this Saturday as part of the Canberra and Region Heritage Festival (all proceeds from the event will be donated to the Canberra branch of the Cerebral Palsy Alliance). As a feature of this year's event, they'd love to find which is the oldest local public clock and to know all you know about it.
To nominate a public clock as our oldest contact the NAWCC's Roger Little on 6162 1877 during business hours or at littleandson@y7mail.com and please contact Gang-gang too.
Saturday's display opens at 10am on the dot.
Rising from the ashes of Aboriginal fires
Have you ever wondered how our city's ever-looming presence, Black Mountain, got its name?
Last Friday's witty heading ''A little blacker mountain'' atop a Canberra Times story about a controlled burning of combustible stuff on Black Mountain reminds us of a plausible explanation for the name. It's given in Bill Gammage's book The Biggest Estate on Earth - How Aborigines Made Australia.
His book, winner of worthwhile awards galore and everywhere getting tongues in thoughtful heads wagging, is his argument that Aboriginal people managed the land, with fire, in a far more systematic and scientific fashion than has been dreamed of by today's pale Australians.
Gammage says that Black Mountain was called that because the Europeans who first trespassed here saw a mountain blackened by fires lit, for good land-management reasons, by Aborigines. He says they used fire to clear away and suppress understoreys like today's thickets of saplings and shrubs on the mountain.
It may only be since Europeans arrived that Black Mountain has been left to become shrubby and green and highly combustible, which last Friday's controlled burns were ameliorating.
