Dammit. It's just impossible to shake her off, isn't it? We're about to wrap up a year of celebrations for our city's 100th birthday, and all anyone will ever remember, collectively, in years to come, is that great, gliding, meditative whale in the sky.

But that's far better, surely, than having nothing memorable to take away from a year of celebrations.

There's nothing "micro" about that goshdarned adorable skyborne beast. But she represents a microcosm of the centenary year as a whole - the good, the bad and the ugly. Indeed, if we were to draw up columns of centenary pros and cons, the Skywhale would figure in each, for different reasons.

Here, then, are five things about the Skywhale that encapsulate the centenary as a whole.

Even the haters can't deny the sheer wonder of the sight of the Skywhale floating above Canberra in all her strange glory. And similarly, there were lots of beautiful moments in the centenary year. The Australian Ballet dancing in homage to Parliament House. The opening of the National Arboretum Canberra at dawn. The Manuka Oval lit up for cricket's one-day international. The elegantly designed centenary merchandise. The Turner exhibition at the National Gallery.

Similarly, much of it has been memorable: the re-creation of Canberra's naming ceremony at the foundation stone. The 21 centenary newborns in matching pink and blue jerseys. The chance to see inside some of the city's international embassies. The biggest ever Government House open day picnic.

And a lot of it was original and quirky (although the Skywhale herself has long transcended such a label). The You Are Here festival in March. The City of Trees art installation at the National Library by British artist Jyll Bradley. The celebration of caravans in the Museum of the Long Weekend.

There was a concerted push, particularly around March, to get the rest of the country interested in our city's milestone, and judging by the year's tourism numbers, many Australians obliged, for various reasons. But the Skywhale, presented as a major moment, a moving spectacle, a photogenic gatecrasher, was always destined to inspire headlines of praise and derision, not to mention a thousand pseudo-hilarious puns relating to her 10 (count them!) enormous breasts and being filled with hot air. Like the politicians!! Get it??

Former chief minister Jon Stanhope, far away on Christmas Island, was appalled. Canberra's centenary, he declared, would be symbolised throughout the rest of country by ''a giant tortoise shape with pendulous breasts''. What's more, the centenary's creative director had "unwittingly fed the voracious beast" that is Canberra-bashing.

''Robyn [Archer] has fed it and given it enough sustenance to keep it going for years,'' he lamented.

That said, many features of the centenary year shed a different, more pensive and scholarly light on Canberra for those willing to make the hike here. An arts-heavy program meant many creative projects and individuals got their time in the sun, and many, such as the You Are Here festival, QL2's dance performance Hit the Floor Together and a visit by the Spiegeltent, were revelations, and will continue beyond 2013.

Our national cultural institutions also stepped up to the mark with several top-notch shows focusing on Canberra's strange and short-but-long history as the product of an ambitious design contest. Walter and Marion were rightly worshipped, and will be for years to come.

Several sporting events also drew the eyes of the country. The Australia-West Indies one-day international in February was watched by more than 2.5 million viewers, and the Women's Australian Open golf tournament ran for four days and had 13 per cent more ticket sales than last year's event in Melbourne. Add to that Summernats and the Spin "weekend on wheels", and Canberra could well be a viable sporting destination from here on. Plus, Archer's intention to cater to Canberra's "blue collar" contingent was realised.

Among all the grumbling about the aesthetic merit/cost/Canberra-bashing bait represented by the Skywhale, there was the very valid point that maybe Canberrans could have been more involved in the "journey" that brought her to us. Rather than keeping her a secret until the great unveiling, and thus risking inevitable disappointment and bewilderment, it would perhaps have been better to introduce her to us earlier. A glimpse of some sketches, a statement by the artist, Patricia Piccinini, to give us a sense of what was to come and maybe, oh, I dunno, an upfront breakdown of how much she was going to cost, would all have given us a sense of ownership of the centenary's pivotal moment. There would then have been no need for an embargo, and more of a build-up of anticipation. And, given her size and stature, the unveiling would have been no less spectacular. Instead, there was a sense among many that the $350,000 artwork had been thrust upon us with orders to like it or else.

Several other parts of the centenary were also lost in translation when it came to execution. The farcical Like Canberra campaign got many ironic thumbs down, and that's as it should be. The Big Birthday Bash was a sprawling disappointment for many who had taken children to the lake expecting the things children expect on a birthday. But Archer wasn't having any of it, instead opting for the cerebral and the conceptual and the arty and the highbrow. Which many other people greatly enjoyed.

Similarly, the massive program, broken up into two volumes, was unwieldy, difficult to navigate and gave no sense of narrative. Each and every event throughout the year, big or small, original or time-honoured, was stamped with the centenary logo, creating confusion as to which were unique to the centenary, and which would have happened anyway.

Is she a great and lasting work of art, design and craftsmanship that, albeit ephemeral in nature, will live on forever in our minds as an example of the boundless limits of human creativity and scientific endeavour? Or is she an embarrassment to us all, one that will forever be a physical manifestation of all that is mockworthy about Canberra?

Was she overpriced, or a bargain? Is she ours, or everyone's or no one's? In this, she really encapsulates Canberra. The year, while engendering a good deal of civic pride and gratitude and gladness that we're all so lucky to live here, also brought out the boring, relentless Canberra-bashing in force. Will people still be whingeing about Canberra's weather/quiet streets/low-key nightlife when the city turns 200? In some ways, we hope so, for it would mean Canberra will remain the hidden treasure we cherish.

A huge, mythical beast flying above Canberra was undoubtedly a feat of great engineering, as pointed by our very own Nobel laureate in physics, Brian Schmidt - "The Skywhale looks like something that was not meant to fly," he said. And so, too, was the idea of celebrating a birthday for an entire year, rather than one month. The centenary program, if only because of its size and scope, was audacious. Not surprisingly, the year of relentless celebration lost momentum towards the end, and the Great Harvey No-Show was almost par for the course by the time November came around. The much vaunted visit by legendary Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, and with him a trail of glittering Hollywood stars, was announced as a major centenary event, one that would once again train the bright regard of the rest of Australia upon us. But then Harvey hurt his leg and, er, couldn't make it.

Similarly, Canberra's very existence and the its reaching 100 are born of controversy. The whole place was conceived mainly because Sydney and Melbourne could not agree on which was better, and when the international design competition was launched and Chicago's Walter Burley and Marion Mahony Griffin were named as winners, they were practically driven out of town, people disliked their vision so much. Enthusiasm for the capital on the part of the federal government waxed and waned over ensuing decades as the country was gripped by war, then the Depression, and then war again, and debate still rages, 100 years on, as to whether the city is even valid anyway, given it doesn't have a beach.

But then, we Canberrans love to argue, and our coverage of the Skywhale and, indeed, the centenary as a whole, has reflected that.