We strive to balance the grotesque and the beautiful in this column (with an unforgivable bias in favour of the grotesque) and today with these two contrasting pictures we manage it with special aplomb.
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The grotesque one is of a famous ACT election stunt of 1992, and the beautiful one, celebrating native birds and native gardens, shows a popular native fowl plunging its nectar-seeking face into a (native, of course) grevillea.
To begin with the grotesque, last Wednesday's column was furnished with an item about the revolutionary and city-shaking introduction of the big wheelie rubbish bins (one for recyclables, one for irretrievable trash) to Canberra. It happened 20 years ago, in 1994, and ArchivesACT has unleashed some "olde" files of the time on that subject. The item sent several readers gambolling down memory lane.
One of the gambollers, an O'Connor reader, was reminded of an essay he wrote at the time. In the same spirt as ArchivesACT, he has dusted it off and sent it to us. It is a sweet glimpse of the way we were, the way we thought.
And just before we go a'gambolling with him, this whole issue gives us an excuse to run again one of the most most unforgettable photographs this major metropolitan broadsheet has ever published. Campaigning for the 1992 Assembly elections, Liberal MLAs "Big Bill" Stefaniak and Tony De Domenico demonstrated their party's support for big bins with this famous stunt. This paper's intrepid Graham Tidy captured the moment.
Making the burly Stefaniak the contents of the bin and the small (but perfectly formed) De Domenico the bin's wielder was probably meant to address fears the fully laden big bins would be too much for frail householders to manoeuvre.
The many trials of, and then the introduction of, the bins agitated lots of newness-averse Canberrans. The Letters pages of this newspaper clanged with their resistance to this revolution.
Our O'Connor correspondent was a good representative of those who had become fond of the old ways of garbage collection, involving two garbos (often engaging in "jovial chortling") running to and fro and emptying the bins into a truck being driven by a third member of the working classes. Our correspondent could even remember how, before World War II, the garbos would come into your backyard (of course, "through the tradesmen's entrance") in search of your garbage, emptying it into a sack and leaving your bin in your backyard.
As the wheelie bin revolution began, he was still very attached to his ye olde steel bin and thought the Guinness Book of Records might be impressed that he had kept the very same bin for "30-plus" years.
Yes, in 1994, lots of us had beloved ancient bins, and their various dents and scars gave them great character (like much used suits of armour) that the characterless plastic wheelie bins have never been able to show.
"And that," the O'Connor essayist continued, "brings us up to date [to 1994]. We have had trial suburbs, trial bins, trial bins recalled, new bins issued, multicoloured bins provided for special occasions, reams of instructions, ministerial declarations on garbage, 100 ways to recycle your old [now redundant] bin and a string of commands that put the original Ten [the Ten Commandments] to shame. Thou shalt put thy bin out facing this direction. It shall not contain this or that. For 14 days thou shalt hang on to thy recyclables but remember thy garbage every seventh."
How he missed, now, "the jovial chortling" of the two garbos, replaced by the sole driver/operator (with no one to chortle jovially to) of the ultra-modern, whisper-quiet garbage trucks, "juggernaut-like horseless carriages with robot-like arms attached".
He pined for the simpler days when all this complexity and technology was unnecessary and when "a pair of brawny arms" was enough.
And the new trucks were eerily sci-fi and sinister. One could imagine them in Dr Who, seeking domination of the universe.
"And so one thing still worries me," the nervous O'Connor essayist concluded.
"At Christmas, do I approach the machine with my traditional gift [for once upon a time grateful householders gave their human garbos a Christmas thank you present, plonking it into their gloved hands], arm extended, only for me to be snatched up and never seen again?"
Moving on to things of beauty, today's other picture is Glenn Pure's smashing picture, taken in his Kambah garden, of a Red Wattlebird fossicking in the flowers of a Johnson's grevillea. The way in which the fowl is getting pollen sprinkled all over its face illustrates a way in which Australian birds and plants often combine to one another's reproductive advantage.
We run the picture in the wake of last week's little flurry of items triggered by readers' witness reports of Canberra's most beloved birds, Australian magpies, feasting on our most despised pests (their terrible stings!), introduced European wasps.
"I have a variant on that story," Glenn Pure tells us.
"I keep bees in my backyard in Kambah (or at least try to, with limited success). A few years ago, I ran into a new problem with my hive. A local red wattlebird family developed a taste for bees and would sit near the hive entrance catching bees in flight as they went past. That hive declined and died out soon after. I can't be certain it was the wattlebirds that caused the fatal decline but they were certainly active and persistent bee-eaters. I even installed [in an unsuccessful attempt to frighten them away] a plastic owl on top of the hive."
