The object of his affections yesterday was the old, decomposing, faded-yellow ''Mandalay'' bus that was once a popular late-night, take-away hot-food kitchen housed in a converted double-decker bus. It stood, emitting exotic smells and with its chains of lights twinkling in the darkness, where it is now, in Haig Park just across the road from where Lonsdale Street arrives at the park. Tens of thousands of today's Canberrans will remember patronising this eccentric eatery in its heyday.

Always attractively seedy, it is now for Dickinson, a connoisseur of such things, magnificently decaying. Yesterday he was crooning about it the way more traditional artists croon, in their misguided way, about the chocolate-box loveliness of Floriade.

''I'm trying to just highlight things that are in the street and that are around and that are interesting … and I love this. I love the way it looks now. I love the decay. And coming from London [he's been here 10 years and lives in Newcastle] the double-decker bus is a strong symbol with me. It's got a faded past. It's got the graffiti on it, which I think really adds to it now. I love the flat tyres. I love the colours on it [yes, there's lots of purple about it - there never was when it was a sober omnibus in use in suburban Sydney] and the fact that it's like this decayed old dinosaur sitting there. There's something dignified about it now. It's almost like a piece of street art. It should [laughing, but meaning it] be heritage-listed.''

Dickinson comes to Canberra (where greeting cards and teatowels of his idiosyncratic illustrations are on sale in boutiquey places like April's Caravan in Lyneham) and gets out and about (yesterday on a bicycle also deserving of heritage-listing) looking for odd Canberra things to sketch. One of his masterpieces (sorry if I gush but I love his work and think it important in representing the real Canberra to the world) is of the funny little pink caravan/souvenir shop that's sometimes up on top of Mount Ainslie. It sells deliciously tacky things. Dickinson remembers with delighted horror a koala fur tissue box which requires you to pull the tissues out of the koala's belly. It is probably illegal because Canberra's anal-retentive laws on such things (like the little red burger caravan at Kingston) try to stamp out the inelegant and the odd. Another kitsch object of his affections, lovingly portrayed, is Cockington Green's zany little publicity vehicle, a mock-Tudor mini with a thatched roof.

His best-selling image (on greeting cards) he reports is what's left of the Starlight drive-in entrance sign beside the highway at Watson. It's the perfect subject for him, he explains, because it's an unfashionable Canberra object that ''resonates'' with Canberra people as soon as they're reminded of it. Generations of us went there, driving past the welcoming sign, sometimes to canoodle, sometimes to indulge our tiny children, putting them into their pyjamas at home and arranging bedding for them in the back of the car, lifting the sleeping mites gently out of the car and carrying them to bed when we got home. Sigh.

Another fine work in the same genre as the Mandalay and the Starlight sign is his portrait of the (closed for the winter and due to re-open soon) diving platform at the Olympic Pool site in Civic. A million pairs of bare Canberran feet scampered up and down its slippery ladders (is there a reader who ever dared to go right up to the dizzying top, and jump?) during the pool's long outdoor history. Dickinson was quick to see what was in those days a utilitarian thing, a means to an end (jumping, screaming, into cool water on hot summer days) we never gave any thought to, is a really rather beautiful and substantial and effortlessly elegant work of public art. What ''resonances'' it has.

Dickinson doesn't make greeting cards out of everything and it's not certain the Mandalay will enjoy that treatment. One sketch in the big sketchbook he showed me yesterday is doomed to remain obscure because it's a big ''Trucks turning'' sign he saw at a Kingston building site across which someone has written the unfortunate sentiment ''F*** you''. We had a boyish laugh about it, and it is just the sort of warts-and-all Canberra artefact.

And yesterday morning, having captured the bus in his sketchbook, he set off on his heritage bicycle in search of other neglected Canberra subjects that either have warts or that (like Canberra's bus shelters he admires and like what he calls the ''Martian Embassy'' of the Shine Dome at the Academy of Science) have some character that needs a little teasing out and celebrating.

Online at Trevor Dickinson dot com (written like that) you'll find quite a gallery of Canberra according to this roving Novocastrian.

Stop the Presses!

Yesterday's column item asking for any reports of the 61 ''lost'' Ethel Carrick Fox paintings of Canberra has already turned up three of them, to the delight of the Canberra Museum and Gallery. Watch this space for further developments.