It would make for exciting authenticity but, alas, we will probably never be able to introduce wild bears to the Bur oak forest of the National Arboretum.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Jocelyn Plovits, convener of Friends of the Arboretum's Warm Trees 2015 really loves the idea, but concedes, tongue-in-cheek, "It might create a few health and safety issues. Just a few."
The Arboretum's Bur oak forest is one of the places singled out for decoration in this year's Warm Trees 2015 installations. It is a project that each year sees people, galvanised by the Friends of the Arboretum, knitting and crocheting warm and colourful things for trees that may seem a little plain, bare and cold in winter.
This year the Bur oak forest is one of the decorated places. Plovits explains that where this oak species grows wild, in North America, they are an important part of the habitats of bears.
Those bears famously scratch great furrows in the oaks' bark, perhaps to mark territories. And so it came to pass that when the landscape architects created the Bur oak forest at the Arboretum, they had it planted out with the trees arranged in giant zig-zag patterns that echo the zig-zag shapes bears scratch in the oaks' bark.
This year Warm Trees, not able to decorate the Bur oaks themselves (they're still a bit small, Plovits explains) has the ground around the trees decorated with knitted, usually scarf-shaped pieces, arranged in zig-zags.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Arboretum (high up on Dairy Farmers Hill) another manifestation of this year's Warm Trees is (pictured) the Rainbow Serpent Wrap installation.
It is the result of the collaboration of the Friends of the Arboretum with the CIT's Yurauna Centre. The centre's cultural arts teacher, Lyndy Delian, says, "The students who created the installation were inspired by the boab tree used in the London Olympics in 2012 as a meeting place to bring people of different nations together.
"It is made from [about 500 metres] of recycled hoses [from the Mugga-Mugga recycling facility] and donated fabric.
"The finished hoses are coiled around trees. The hoses represent water, the trees stand for land and the rainbow serpent moved across our country in many forms and with different names, creating rivers, mountains and other features."
The Warm Trees 2015 installations will be in place until August 1.
Wimbledon wild man
Meanwhile, across the world no one is needing warm, knitted garments at this year's hot-weather Wimbledon. And with Wimbledon under way, our nation is facing the challenge of deciding whether it is possible to adore Aussie tennis star Nick Kyrgios in spite of his sometimes awful on-court behaviour.
We have been down this avenue before, for today's mild-mannered and nationally beloved Lleyton Hewitt (surely PM Abbott is on the brink of giving Hewitt a knighthood?) was occasionally an on-court hobgoblin. Sometimes he made his nation wince with shame.
A little more on this subject of great national importance in a moment. But first the whimsical observation that while no one has yet to rise to the considerable challenge of writing a limerick about our controversial Nick Kyrgios, reader Laurie McDonald has dusted off "a limerick I wrote a while back while Federer was in his prime".
"I think my writing of it may have started his slide."
In fact, though, Federer has scarcely slid at all (he is the second seed in this fortnight's men's singles) and the sentiments of the insightful limerick remain true.
If they want to beat that bloke Federer/They'll have to get much more betterer,/Practice much harderer,/Hit much more fasterer/And get much more fitterer…
Soonerer or laterer someone gifted at such things really should try to write a limerick about Canberra's Nick Kyrgios (and we invite readers to rise to that challenge). Meanwhile here is this columnist's modest attempt.
Australia's own Nick Kyrgios/Plays tennis so blithely imperious./It leaves fans delirious/And so, etiquette oblivious,/They forgive his behaviour obnoxios.
Nick Kyrgios' long-suffering mother is asking us all to have "patience" with her son, since after all he is only 20 and few of us can say we behaved impeccably at that age. Certainly Lleyton Hewitt has mellowed and matured over the years. Today no one will begrudge this amiable gentleman his knighthood. But it was not always thus.
My many years of covering the Australian Open fortnight in Melbourne coincided with Hewitt's rise from teenage prodigy to the several years of his heyday.
It is one of my vivid memories of mingling at the Open with sports writers who spent much of the year following tennis, that the difficult Lleyton Hewitt and difficult Team Hewitt (which included his ever-present, often hatchet-faced mother and father) were widely despised by journos.
To ever write a negative thing about Hewitt was to get into the bad books of Team Hewitt, rather as today one cannot air a sceptical thought without the PM demanding to know why we are not on the side of Team Australia.
When our Hewitt played Russia's Marat Safin in the 2005 men's singles final, the Open newsroom of mostly Australian journos was openly barracking for Safin. We were all temporarily depressed when Hewitt won the first set, but then became elated when the likeable Safin overhauled the almost-impossible-to-like Hewitt and went on to win. No mindless patriotism there.
But these days everyone, even our nation's discerning and sceptical sports writers, would want today's likeable Sir Lleyton to win everything there is. So, yes, let's be patient with our combustible Nick, that rare thing, a youngster youth is not wasted on.
100 Years Ago. Would peace-loving Jesus have fought the Huns?
Is Our Redeemer, a militant or a pacifist? One hundred years ago this week seething reader Angela Booth wrote to cancel her subscription to Melbourne's pacifist weekly The Woman Voter. The newspaper then answered back.
"Dear Madam,– I must regretfully ask you to take my name off the Woman Voter subscription list. I deplore the attitude of your paper towards the Motherland [England] in this life struggle. To have criticised England ... when she is at death grips with an enemy [as evil] as Germany, is to me highly treasonable. There is a peace that can be worse than any war – a peace in which the spirit can rot and die. Christ said that even He had come with a sword. – Angela Booth."
Woman Voter retorted that "It is true He said, 'I came not. to bring peace, but a sword,' but His language was the figurative expression of a spiritual fact – that the practice of truth and love and justice is the sword of destruction to hate and injustice."
"But when the actual sword was used to the physical hurt of an individual, Jesus rebuked his overzealous disciple with the memorable words, 'Put up thy sword, for they that take the sword shall perish by the sword'."
"War is hell, and it shows all the hellish qualities of hate, cruelty, and murder, whether it is waged by England or Germany. – Adela Pankhurst."