As reported here over the past year, in engrossing instalments, the impossibly precious building has gone from being a neglected ruin (and so the ANU's Shed of Shame) to being sensitively, excellently and heart-warmingly repaired and restored. The centenary, and the fact that the shed was built in 1913, encouraged the ANU to get a wriggle on.

Now it emerges that two Canberra artists, glass artist Naomi Somerville and silversmith Maria Klingner, have salvaged 1913 materials left over when, over recent months, the shed was being worked upon. They sometimes fossicked in the site's skip. They've called their collection The Buggy Shed Evolved and the works include rings, bracelets, pendants and brooches made from glass, timber and metal that had been part of the shed but couldn't be reused in its therapeutic treatment.

They were both rejoicing inside the attractively cobwebbed shed on Monday that they've been able to ''give new life'' to materials that would otherwise have been tossed out.

Somerville recalled: ''We were going to do a show that relates to the centenary and we were looking for materials that were from 1913 and this place just came up. It was the opportunity we were looking for.''

The materials did not look that promising at first (on Monday they'd brought with them a typical chunk of one of the shed's termite-worried beams, bristling with ugly handmade nails, that looked as if it might have come from the wreck of Noah's Ark). But the artists got to work with the sometimes ''unforgiving'' wooden, metal and glass fragments. For example, Klingner has made a whole bagful of rings from old nails she had to heat up to red heat to make malleable and then sculpt and coax into objects that will fit on fingers and say, ''Look at me!'' Each ring is heavy and full of primitive character and has, in a hard-to-define way, some of the essence of Canberra the centenarian about it.

Their Buggy Shed Evolved collection is part of the Belconnen Arts Centre's 100 - Random9 exhibition that opens this Friday.

You would never forget it, would you, if the man across the road built a hovercraft (of all things!) and took it for practice runs in his front garden?

Reader Cheryl Gay has never forgotten it and so is one of several readers quick to help us identify the hitherto unnamed gentleman whose photograph appeared in Monday's Gang-gang column.

The column told the story of how, in 1964, the infant Lake Burley Griffin was rattled and stirred by the ''world's first hovercraft race''.

We decorated the story with not only in the online version some news film of the newsworthy occasion but also a photograph of an unnamed boffin sitting on his little, home-made hovercraft.

Every hovercraft for the race was made at home by enthusiasts, imparting extra geeky charm to the contest.

The National Archives of Australia had not a word of information to give us to go with this picture it so kindly supplied to us (save that it was taken in 1964 at the time of the race).

''I'm pretty sure,'' Cheryl Gay tells us, ''that the gentleman on the hovercraft in the photo is Mr Ellis, who lived opposite us in Turner. I remember him testing the hovercraft out in his garden. We were fascinated by it and we went to the lake to watch him in the race. I think he may have worked at the ANU. I cannot remember his first name, as in those days we only ever addressed adults by their title and surname.''

Several other readers, including most authoritatively of all his daughters, have identified the man as Alan Ellis, an electronics technician with the ANU's John Curtin School of Medical Research. His daughters say the photograph of him and his petite hovercraft (some of the others in the race were much burlier) ''was taken in our backyard at 3 Spencer Street, Turner, while he was preparing for the event''.

You can see the aforementioned Cinesound newsreel by going to The Canberra Times online and typing in ''Futuristic past hovers into view''.

Of the many watercolour portraits of the famous that Pat Spalding painted for her exhibition Canberra's Faces: Banks to Bonner. Our Suburbs and the Faces behind the Names, one face in particular gave her endless trouble.

''No matter how I painted Ben Chifley,'' she told us in her tour of the portraits at Saturday's opening, ''he always looked like Peter Slipper.''

''I tried putting a pipe in his mouth [Chifley was a famous pipe smoker] but he just looked like Peter Slipper smoking a pipe!''

Eventually, as you can see in this the finished portrait at right, she did overcome what believers in the occult may think was Peter Slipper's attempt to use spells to insert his face into a series of portraits of people more famous than himself.

The exhibition (which includes Spalding's portrait of artist Charles Conder, for the Tuggeranong suburb named after him and not after the condor, a South American buzzard) continues at the Tuggeranong Arts Centre, in the former Nolan Gallery at Lanyon.