Gang-gang. Battle of Waterloo to be fought again, in Canberra

It is Dr Michael Molkentin's Australia And The War In The Air, dealing with the almost unsung subject of Australia's Great War magnificent men in flying machines. We were at the Australian War Memorial on Wednesday when the author was handed the coveted Bryan Gandevia Prize for Military History for the Ph.D thesis that has now become the book.

Speaking to us on Wednesday he told us the intriguing truth that "When the AIF's first contingent left these shores in November 1914, its ships carried neither aircraft nor aviators. Few indeed of the 20,000 or so soldiers on board the convoy had ever even seen an aeroplane, that technical wonder that had emerged only a decade earlier and was only in the midst of its pioneering days when the war began"

Thinking readers who want to learn, at last, how Australians (who from the earliest days of the war volunteered to fight in the air) took to fighting with these new-fangled contraptions, will find the book on sale at the Memorial's and at other discerning book emporiums.

And while on battle matters - as much nattered about here in recent days this week brings the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. It is a battle with which Canberra has long been thought, folklorically, to have a special association.

That imagined association is that James Ainslie, our eucalypt-upholstered Mount Ainslie named in his honour, fought at the Battle of Waterloo before migrating to these colonies and these Limestone Plains. Here the Scot became a shepherd and overseer in the employ of the laird of Duntroon.

Several readers have pricked up their ears (almost as endearing a thing in a reader as it is in a german shepherd dog) at this column's discussion of some rather spoilsporty research casting doubt on whether James Ainslie was ever at Waterloo. Rowan Henderson of the Canberra Museum and Gallery, after some scholarly fossicking, is fairly sure that Ainslie was not there to assist the Duke of Wellington on that famous day.

And while so many readers have their ears so attractively pricked up by this subject we ought to remind readers of Rowan Henderson's pioneering research into what became of James Ainslie after he returned home to Scotland. Until Henderson's investigations Ainslie had seemed to just disappear into the Scottish gloaming.

But just before giving you that chapter and verse, and to cheer us up before we plunge into Ainslie's tragedy, we report that Canberra will have its own (virtual) Battle of Waterloo this Sunday. Organiser Brad Pillans (who has been known to dress as Napoleon for these occasions) advises that there will be the annual Battle of Waterloo (of course rather special in this anniversary year) of a gathering of splendid French versus British cars. It is organised by the Renault Owners Club of Canberra (ROCC) in conjunction with the Peugeot Association of Canberra (PAC) and sponsors. But had there been cars at the time one feels sure that Napoleon would, like Inspector Maigret, have driven a Citroen.

The friendly Battle will be waged from 10am to 3pm this Sunday at Rond Terrace at the foot of Anzac Parade. There will be door prizes of bottles of wine with the unfortunate name of The Arrogant Frog.

But enough of frivolity and back to the melancholy tale of James Ainslie.

He went home to Scotland in 1835 and Henderson, penetrating the gloaming, first found Ainslie in 1841, 54-years-old and living near Jedburgh. By then (already famously a grog-loving, troubled, and perhaps even a deranged soul while here on the Limestone Plains) he had been in much trouble with the law for being a dangerous public nuisance since his return to Scotland.

Henderson found newspaper reports of Ainslie's many newsworthy offences. Then in April 1844, being held in a castle prison while awaiting a hearing on some new charges, Ainslie took his own life. The Caledonian Mercury went into some detail about the poor man's "preparations" for his suicide and then recorded that "having completed these preparations, he stepped from a slight elevation into the eternal world".

Experience shows, though, that nice folkoric myths are seldom done any damage by the truth so that Henderson's scholarly findings that Ainslie wasn't at Waterloo is unlikely to spoil the legend that he was. Loch Ness will aways have the monster we want there to be there.

Similarly, we are reminded in recent days by a misguided letter to the editor, of how the true story of what King Canute was up to when he told the tide to obey him and to stop coming in, never stands a chance against the myth.

The myth has him as a narcissistic tall poppy being made to look like a drongo when the tide didn't obey him but kept on coming in, wetting his regal shins. The truth, not so brightly-coloured and festooned with far fewer balloons, is that he was making the Christian point to his subjects that the tides are choreographed by Almighty God and that not even the mightiest earthly king (and Canute was very mighty indeed) could contradict God's choreography.