Seeing this, a mature age reader ("I'm 93") called to say that she is living in Canberra with (it was beside her as she spoke) a venerable Berlin-made German piano that her father bought in 1910. She can recall how, when she was a child in Cessnock, her dad would often load this piano into a horse-drawn wagon and take it to venues where its Teutonic ivories* could be tickled for dances and other functions.

Canberra and its region is bound to be sprinkled with old German pianos because the historian Humphrey McQueen, writing about the social importance of the imported piano ('this cumbersome symbol of higher civilisation", says that Australia imported 700,000 of them in the 19th century alone.

He points out how a piano, having been brought thousands of miles across the ocean, might then be lugged a thousand miles inland in Australia to be (like our caller's Cessnock piano) life-enrichingly crucial to the social lives of remote folk.

*Older writers like this columnist, with big, old vocabularies are always at war with illiterate modern spell-checking programs. Today the program, having never heard of the word ivories, insists I am trying to write about the tickling of ovaries.