Gang-gang. Canberra's faunal emblem bullied by mere chicken

On Saturday, renowned birdlife photographer Andrew Garrett (his images of cockatoos have graced this column) saw his backyard Plymouth Rock chicken take exception to the male and female Gang-gang cockatoos being in the garden and on a bird table. The photographer has captured the exact moment at which the introduced farmyard fowl has swaggered up on to the table, startling the native couple, driving away those emblems of this long-established column and, less importantly, of the ACT.

This Plymouth Rock chicken is memorably pretty but the most unforgettable bird at large in the ACT at the moment is the giant magpie that flits and perches in the so-called "naive" paintings of Dean Bowen. We have previously run one picture of this feathery mammoth but here is another of it standing on top of a skyscraper. This is Bowen's Magpie pecking antennae.

Bowen testifies, naively, that "last year I moved to a larger light-filled studio ... This new space, with wonderful light, was filled with the optimism of a new morning as I continued developing different series of works simultaneously such as comets and the starry night, skyscrapers and white towers, urban and country life, birds and animals, childhood memories, the monumental and the miniature, all enhancing and reflecting each other through a prism of humour and optimism."

Magpie pecking antennae is a futuristic painting, since for the time-being Canberra is too inhibited, too afraid of the anti-progress cults (masquerading as residents' associations) to build any decent skyscrapers. But one day we may. And if we build them they (the giant magpies) will come.

Dean Bowen's exhibition New Morning continues at the Beaver Galleries in Deakin until June 12.

And while we are outdoors with the magpies, this column adds its influential voice to the disappointments being shown over the Canberra CBD group's decision to discontinue the summer-long displays of petunias. They beautified the otherwise not-especially-beautiful Civic. If only, as so often urged here, we had a Canberra Complaints Choir (modelled on the fabled Helsinki Complaints Choir) this is just the kind of decision the choir could warble against.

In January, we interviewed Byam Wight, chief petuniateer of The Planter People, about his 1350 planters of petunias in Civic. We wrote, a bit pretentiously, that although Civic was down on her luck and looking increasingly shabby and dowdy, "she" was still displaying some defiant gaiety by wearing so many brightly-coloured flowers (all of them petunias) in her hair. Byam Wight told us how every day "I'm in there [Civic] from 3.30am to water them. I've got the place very much to myself then! And I'm finished and out of Civic by 8.30am, beating the heat. I water a third of the planters every day so that it's very like painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge" [in that the process rolls on continuously].

Canberra CBD is going to spend the money hitherto spent on petunias on festooning more Civic trees with lights. The Canberra Complaints Choir, singing about this, would warble that those Canberrans more likely to frequent Civic in daylight than after dark will be perplexed by the decision. The petunias were at their best in daylight when she, dowdy Civic, was teeming with rank and file Canberrans. The lights will be pretty at night when only stop-outs (people like night-clubbers and adulterers) will be out and about.

Flowers can really lift a CBD and well-travelled Canberrans will know of cities that beauteously infiltrate their CBDs with flower beds. Downtown Oslo in spring is a wonder to behold, with a kind of sprawling, popping-up-everywhere, tulip-led informal Floriade. Another kind of choir, the positive-thinking Canberra Suggestion Songsters, should trill support for the idea that our hitherto detained-in-one-place Floriade should be set free to gambol all through the CBD.

Correction. Blush. Monday's column sang the praises of the ANU's Solar Invictus team's exciting plans to enter a highly competitive EV (electric vehicle) in the 2017 World Solar Challenge (WSC). This whisper-quiet gallop (for electric vehicles make little sound) is from Darwin to Adelaide.

Carried away (for this brainy crusade promises to bring honour and glory to our city, which is why the Chief Minister is so supportive of it and attended last Friday's glittering sponsorship and networking function) we imagined that this was the national capital's first tilt at the WSC. But now it emerges, if readers' memories serve them correctly, that Ginninderra College (and perhaps too another Canberra college) had a go in the 1990s. We are probing and investigating this and invite readers who may have participated to enlighten us.