Murder most fowl in a leafy inner suburb

Meanwhile, in happier news, as Canberra loses one famous fowl it gains another in the form of a painted portrait of Robert, a kind of Phar Lap of poultry, just acquired by the National Museum of Australia. More of the immortalised Robert in a moment.

But for now, back to the deceased peahen. ''This morning peering out the window,'' our distressed Narrabundah correspondent reports, ''we discovered to our horror that the famous white Narrabundah peacock - attracting special attention in the neighbourhood because of its rarity - was lying [mangled] on our lawn.''

''Bunches of white feathers were scattered across the grass and up into the bushes. Doris, as we called her, had clearly put up a brave fight to defend her eggs. Our daughter, whose window is closest to the scene of the crime, thought she had heard wild flapping of wings in the early hours of the morning, and then a multitude of squawkings as the peacocks called out in distress across the neighbourhood.

''Only 10 days ago we were excited to discover that Doris was sitting on eggs, hidden underneath our old prunus tree. Since then, Christmas mail has gone around the world with the news that possibly there will soon be more white peacocks in Narrabundah. But this morning as her white-plumed corpse lay tragically next to the white daisies in the back garden, there was not a trace of the eggs to be found. Could the mean murderer be a fox? Has such a beast been spotted in the neighbourhood?''

Meanwhile, you sense, looking at the magnificent Robert the Game Bird (descended from fighting cocks) with his powerful legs and awe-inspiring feet, that he might have been more than a match for a fox.

The museum advises that it has just acquired an oil painting by S.R. Robertson, of Robert, a Modern Game Bantam. Robert won the cup for Best Bird In Show at the Old Goulburn Poultry, Pigeon and Canary Club's annual show in 1921. He belonged to Mr Cecil Thompson (perhaps Thomson), a Goulburn breeder and exhibitor of poultry.

As well as being Best Bird for Thompson at the 1921 show Robert already held the Sydney Royal Show Cup and other gongs and sashes galore. No wonder Thompson wanted Robert immortalised like this, the way wealthy Britons used to engage the great George Stubbs (1724-1806) to paint portraits of their champion horses.

In the just-acquired work (important to the museum because poultry breeding and showing has been an important Australian passion) Robert is accompanied in the frame by eight prize medals won by Thompson's fowls at shows in Sydney, Melbourne and Goulburn between 1924 and 1948.

From the portrait even the most poultry-ignorant of us can see that there is a certain grandeur about Robert. He is a Game Bird and in his 1899 Australasian Book of Poultry expert A.J. Compton enthused that the Modern British Game Fowls are ''the most noble looking of birds''. Compton felt that the Modern Game Bantam was, together with the racehorse and the greyhound, one of ''the three aristocrats of the livestock world''.

The museum has asked for our help, because Cecil Thompson/Thomson was a Goulburn man and because ours is a parochial column concerned with these parts, in finding out more about him. Surely he has descendants hereabouts?

He is a little mysterious at the moment (the museum is not even sure of the spelling of his surname).

Curator Nicole McLennan says that the more that can be found out about him the better stories can accompany the forthcoming display of Robert's portrait.

One shudders to think what Sigmund Freud and other famous interpreters of dreams would make of the elephant's trunk in Cathy Nacion's artwork Dreams. The big (two metres by one metre) and attention-arresting work, pictured, has just won her the inaugural $400 Ray White Belconnen Art Prize. Nacion, in year 12 at Gungahlin College, has Dreams in the College Express 5 exhibition at the Belconnen Arts Centre.

We don't know what Freud would have thought but the artist explains that ''The theme of my artwork is surrealism and it focuses on dreams. I was inspired to create a string of random animals and objects which represent the major characteristics of a dream. The elephant symbolises happiness, the octopus symbolises the different sensations, the spider shows how a bad dream can come crawling into an ordinary one. The light bulbs signify solid and corrupted thoughts, and the balloon symbolises how a dream can easily float away when you wake up. The trunk of the elephant suddenly transforms into the tentacle of the octopus in order to illustrate the constantly changing nature of a dream.''

College Express 5, displaying the works of talented artists in years 11 and 12 from colleges in the north Canberra region, continues at the dream-like Belconnen Arts Centre (see it now before it turns into the tentacle of an octopus) until January 26.