We suggested that, delivered to Canberra, the great master of the interplay of light with smoke, haze and fog would hurry out to Summernats. There he'd paint, ecstatically, that event's fabled burn-out competitions with their clouds of billowing fumes.

Westerburg likes that idea but also thinks that ''should a warp in time allow JMW to return to be with us today, I would like to suggest he might 'give a shout out' on either Facebook or Twitter to his Canberra progeny''.

''Yes, some of us are scattered here throughout the 'burbs [just off the top of her head she could think of some in Curtin, Griffith, Reid and Downer] but as we spring from illegitimate relations we have not been so quick to boast and gloat about it.

''Thanks to my late great-uncle Harry, who shook the family tree to see if there was any truth to the family lore that the 'greatest of landscape painters' was indeed his own great-grandfather, we now have it documented. Ergo some of JMW's great-great, great-great-great grandchildren are settled here in the nation's capital. I'm a granddaughter with four or five 'greats'.''

Great uncle Harry's meticulous findings (she's sent some of them to us) show that Sophia Turner, one of the illegitimate daughters of the artist (he never married) migrated to Australia in her 20s. She arrived in 1858 and on April 1, 1861, and at something called the Primitive Methodist Church in Newcastle married one Isaiah Hurst. The present suburban sprinklings of people with some JMW Turner blood are the plentiful descendants of Sophia and Isaiah.

Do they, these descendants, find themselves doing eerily well in art competitions such as The Canberra Times Outdoor Art Show? If they do, then it may be that they are getting some genetic assistance from the gifted JMW Turner, who, never visiting Australia, died in London in 1851 from something (Westerburg has a copy of his death certificate) called ''natural decay''.

Call us slow-witted but when the Belconnen Arts Centre sent us photographs to be shown in its Women: Celebrating a Century of Women in Canberra exhibition we took them to be old pictures taken in the long-ago times depicted. We imagined that the women in the oldest-looking of them must have long since gone the way of all flesh. And yet it is no wonder that we were fooled because it turns out that the women of the Majura Women's Group (it is their exhibition and they are 21st century women posed in the ancient-looking pictures) went to enormous pains to make the pictures look and feel authentic.

The group's Victoria Sutherland explains that for this exhibition (it investigates what life was like for women in Canberra over the past 100 years) they got expert advice on everything.

Then, having been taught, they went about it all themselves.

Different, specialist experts advised them on the clothing, hair-styling, make-up and even the poses and facial expressions (''the 1920s were a bit stern'') that were adopted by the models of the eras being captured.

For example modern make-up, Sutherland says, leaves women looking glossy and so to look like damsels of yesteryear ''and so that we didn't shine'' they used mineral-based make-up that gave them a convincing matt finish.

Sutherland says that an early decision had to be made about ''whether to go poor or rich'' since after all, the poor and the rich have always dressed and posed and done their hair differently (with the poor seldom doing their hair at all).

Laughing, she remembers how this dilemma was quickly resolved with agreement that ''Let's all go rich!'' and that's why, in this circa 1910 picture from the exhibition, the women look comfortable and bourgeois. You sense that this is a home, probably an Anglican vicarage, that employs a maid, and that her snobbish employers have excluded her (on class grounds) from this pose for this daguerreotype.

■ The exhibition in the foyer of the Belconnen Arts Centre continues until Sunday, August 4.

Singer Joan Baez the all-round ''musical and political force of nature'' has just announced her first Australian tour in 25 years. She will be in Canberra on August 24. Lots of us of her radical persuasions who remember her with great fondness for her opposition to the war in Vietnam will for nostalgia's sake shuffle along to the Royal Theatre to see her.

In an eerie coincidence a colleague here at the Times had just bought from the USA a copy of this once famous and now somehow blush-makingly sexist 1968 poster, urging Draft Resistance in those boys being conscripted for the Vietnam madness. Joan Baez, 72 now bless her, is the ''girl'' in the black hat and in shoes.