Gang-gang: Big knitting

Back to the happiness of extreme knitting in moment, but first to the unhappy truth that philistine Canberra is rather public art poor. But by contrast many Scandinavian cities are festooned with fine and often witty or moving sculptures. Canberran Peter Sesterka of Hawker was recently in sculpture-rich Reykjavik in enthralling Iceland and saw and photographed this startling work The Unknown Bureaucrat.

It had a special resonance for him, as it will for all Canberrans, because it celebrates public servants, that species of wage slave for which Canberra is most renowned. No doubt, if the mood of our city was a little more Nordic and we were more generous-spirited about public art, we too would find some way to celebrate our cruelly unsung public servants. But as it is, alas, anal-retentive, bean-counting philistine Canberrans have so terrorised ACT governments in these matters that it is hard for public art to be funded here.

What is Reykjavik's The Unknown Bureaucrat saying? One Reykjavik local divines that "Magnus Tomasson's The Unknown Bureaucrat shows a man carrying a briefcase. He is embedded in a rock."

"It was erected to emphasise the role of bureaucrats in this world. The rock is not only a metaphor for the weight of the daily life but also hints at the unknown civil servant who is usually not perceived as a human being but just as a cog in a wheel. I love this sculpture because it's so simple but compelling."

Your columnist has often thought that we should have in Canberra, as a celebration of public servants, a Big Public Servant. This would give us at last, one of those Big Things with which other more fun-loving Australian places are blessed. Lots of the nation's Big Things represent, as Canberra's Big Public Servant would, human figures. Cairns has its Big Captain Cook, Glenrowan its Big Ned Kelly and Medindie its Big Scotsman in a very big kilt.

Canberrans would be quick to embrace our Big Public Servant. And (and here comes the knitting theme we'd already embarked upon before we heard Eden's news) all Canberrans could be invited to join in the community knitting of his Big Cardigan. A Big Cardigan would be as indispensable for a a Big Public Servant as a Big Kilt is for a Big Scotsman). The community knitting of it would bring us together.

I offer this brainwave to Chief Minister Andrew Barr and to the leader of the Liberal opposition (whose name escapes me for the moment) in the hope that it might become a popular election promise for the 2016 elections.

Meanwhile, the Eden Magnet explains that "the enormous beanie, two metres high and almost five metres across, is made from dozens of woollen squares hand-knitted by community volunteers as the colourful culmination of a 12-month fundraiser for the Bega Valley Wig Library and 'Wrap With Love' charity group".

"Eden Killer Whale Museum spokeswoman Jenny Drenkhahn said every year the museum chose a charity to support and that this year the museum had wanted to raise funds for local cancer sufferers."

Features of this feat of knitting have been the more than 100 squares knitted by 88-year-old Cathcart knittingtrix Eileen Walder and the 140 squares knitted by the students of Eden Marine High School, with most of those 40 student knitters (many of the 40 from families touched by cancer) being boys. Most of the boys were novice knitters and one of them, dropping a stitch while knitting during school lunchtime and not knowing what to do, ran home to get the help of his nan.

Surely, Canberrans, there are some prominent, vaguely head-shaped features of Canberra buildings that could be adorned with community-knitted beanies? The knitting would feel especially heartfelt in wintry Canberra where beanieless heads feel naked and the frost does not so much nibble the ears as gnaw at them, like a polar bear eating a walrus.

But back to sculptures, and, eerily, Peter Sesterka's contribution from sculpture-rich Reykjavik comes just days after my own return from, gibbering with enthusiasm about it, Norway's Oslo. It is liberally festooned with fine statuary. In conversation Sesterka and this writer agreed that the Nordic approach to these things is something Canberra might learn from.

Norwegians are immensely proud of their many heroines and heroes of the arts, of polar exploration and of civic achievements, and tend to immortalise them in fine sculptures in ways we (perhaps indifferent to the arts and grumpy about tall poppies) tend not to.

And on one of my idyllic early morning Oslo statue-visiting walks a familiar and appropriate melody clanged out over the CBD from the belfry of Oslo's inexplicably ugly Town Hall. It was the Morning Mood from the Peer Gynt Suite, by Norway's national composer Edvard Grieg.

Enviable Norway, to have a national composer, as well as to have in the polar hero Fridtjof Nansen, a national hero! Will we, in Australia, ever have one of each of those? Do we, perhaps, already have one of each of them, but lack the goodwill to elevate anyone to such tall poppydom?

Stepping out on to the platform at Melbourne's Flinders St. station one morning 100 years ago this week socialite "Clio" the Melbourne Punch columnist felt, to her horror, something around her ankles! Had her undies slipped down?

"I dreaded to look down and learn."

But, thank goodness, what was around her ankles turned out to tangles of an escaped ball of wool belonging to "a dismayed sock knitter" one of the many, many knitters on the train. "Clio" was one of several who'd become enmeshed.

"By the time Sister Susie [the dismayed owner of the errant wool] had the ball neatly wound and restored to her the crowd became so hopelessly tangled and excited that I thought the police would arrive at any moment."

It was just another proof, "Clio" reported, of how Melbourne was in a frenzy of wartime knitting in the spirit of the popular song Sister Susie Sewing Shirts For Soldiers.

"Why, special permission was applied for, and granted, for members of the congregation of a church in a western suburb to knit during' the service! So you see you can't get away from it [knitting]."

"At breakfast, in the early suburban trains and trams, in shops, offices, factories; in the tea rooms, cafes, at concerts, theatres, committee meetings, supper parties the click of knitting needles is heard throughout the land. Even our most frivolous [social] butterflies are soberly enmeshed - in woolly bonds of worsted. And now even at church the industrious needles are to be permitted to flash and click!".