It is a five-minute film in glorious Kodachrome of the 1953 Victorian Football League (now AFL) semi-final featuring ultra-legendary Essendon full-forward John Coleman.

Pleasures of the footage include the delight of the old-fashioned way in which most of the newsreel is necessarily shot from the sidelines - today's TV coverage is mostly academically remote and from on high - putting us in among the players and so close to them you think you can smell the embrocations - my nose picked the distinctive bouquet of Sloan's Liniment - they've rubbed into their blokey legs.

NFSA curator Simon Smith enthuses that when he went fossicking through some old cans of film in a place where there were no projectors ("just holding the film up to the light and taking a punt") he was suddenly zapped with optimism.

"The moment I saw it was an Essendon game I said to myself 'Wouldn't it be amazing if Coleman is in it!' And when I saw it was Coleman, I couldn't believe it! It may be the greatest moment I've had as an archivist."

His joy derives from the fact while Coleman is agreed to be the greatest full-forward (taking ''screaming'' marks and kicking goals) the game has ever known (he's honoured today with the Coleman Medal given annually to the player who kicks the most goals in a season), until the discovery of this five minutes there were only two minutes of film of him in action. For his was a six-season, pre-TV career (from 1949-1954), Smith explains, and even newsreel coverage of games was scant.

Even with this extra five minutes, there's still, poignantly, no footage of the god-like chap doing what he was legendarily famous for, scoring goals. Tragically, the match at which the uncharacteristically coloured and uncharacteristically comprehensive footage was captured was Coleman's worst match of the season.

Smith reports that Coleman had been ill with influenza and to make things worse he was marked by his most accomplished nemesis, Footscray full-back Herb Henderson. But Coleman is honoured now with a smashing new statue at the MCG that catches him taking exactly the sort of mark that was his hallmark.

Notice, too, Smith suggests, how relatively average-looking the physiques of the 1953 chaps are. Today's players, full-time athletes, are like bemuscled beings from another planet's race - far taller and infinitely beefier than our own. But 1953's part-timers ("every one of the players had a job during the week" Smith is sure) are but for the occasional bean pole, the blokes next door.

To see the film, to time-travel back to that sunny but windy MCG in 1953, go to the NFSA's web page and click on "Rare AFL Footage". Coleman is the Essendon player (red and black) in the No. 10 shirt.

Actual Corroboree frogs are tiny and timid and never look you challengingly straight in the eye, but the frog of Heather Holland's Corroboree Frog Guarding Eggs has some giant, menacing, Jurassic Park qualities. And it is guarding Jurassic-sized eggs from which more black and yellow monsters will soon emerge.

This super frog is part of the current monthly Queanbeyan Art Society exhibition at the QAS's ripper little gallery (and online, too), but alas the exhibition (at the opening of which I said a few revolutionary words) features all the disappointments always shown by Canberra and district painters. In particular there is that phobic fear of painting the most interesting subject of all, people. Of 63 paintings in the exhibition, only three contain any of our species. This is roughly the ratio of populated to deserted works always encountered in my exhibition-going peregrinations.

What are we going to do, readers, to rescue Canberra painters from the mud in which they are stuck, obsessed with gum trees and prettiness? How can we send them and their sketch pads out to Summernats, to CBR Brave hockey matches, to question time in the Assembly, engage with the real, living and breathing, tattooed (and sometimes even pierced), Canberra?

While with the arts, we have alerted the Australian Electoral Commission to some most suspicious results in ABC Classic FM's Baroque and Before election, completed last Sunday, in which listeners were invited to vote for their favourite music composed up to about 1750. As Sunday's countdown edged its way up into the top few, with Vivaldi's Four Seasons a certainty to come second and Handel's Messiah a foregone conclusion as winner because dull voters always vote for the familiar - as they did so often for John Howard - suddenly, at No. 3, in came Allegri's undistinguished and appropriately miserable Miserere mei, Deus.

Only vote rigging could have got this work into the 100 any higher than 99. How did it leapfrog so many superior and far better-known works, even trouncing dozens of masterpieces of Bach, including his St Matthew Passion (fifth)?

We think the AEC's probe will find some skulduggery here, some deception of Aunty. Perhaps some monastery or Young Liberals' massed choir is rehearsing to inflict the Miserere on an audience and the choirmaster had everyone in the choir vote for it.