Gang-gang. Forthcoming Canberra orienteering event uses cocky cockatoo logo

Our city is famously fond of our charismatic faunal emblem and now that fondness shines forth yet again and in a new context.

Bob Mouatt of Orienteering ACT alerts that "As an avian aficionado you will be pleased that Orienteering ACT pays homage to the ACT's faunal emblem through the naming of the ACT team in the National Orienteering League, the Canberra Cockatoos. And this year we feature the Gang-gang in the logo for the 2016 Australian 3-Days which will held in Canberra over the Easter long weekend."

See the carnival's website for every exquisite detail of the event.

Meanwhile it emerges that orienteer, ornithologist, photographer and wit Geoffrey Dabb, a frequent contributor to this column, has seen and heard (see our picture) Gang-gang cockatoos discussing the sport of orienteering.

It should come as no surprise that the species, so accomplished at navigating its ways between the city where we see it and the mountains where it breeds, should be be keen on and good at orienteering, at cunning fluttering.

Sensitive Geoffrey Dabb, always alert to gender equity in the portrayal of the species, gives us both a male and female while Tate Needham's grand orienteering logo errs sexistly on just the male.

My suburb's shopping centre is peculiarly blessed with Gang-gang cockatoos and yet, alas, is sadly bereft of any of the beggars that can lend a place such colour and variety.

Always in search of Canberra's heart, that sometimes elusive giblet, this columnist is taking a keen interest in Canberrans' responses to Canberra's beggars.

Colleague David Ellery, curator of this column in recent weeks, generated considerable correspondence to Gang-gang with an item on the city's beggars and "panhandlers". He found out lots about the sometimes creative fiction they use when trying to wrench donations from burghers with attempts at heart-wrenching stories.

Alas, one looks in vain for very much human, Good Samaritanesque warmth in any of this correspondence. For the most part burghers seem to feel affronted by the approaches of these unhappy souls and want the authorities to somehow erase them from this Happy Valley. Those of you (woe unto you, ye hypocrites) who rage against beggars but who kid yourselves you are Christians are referred to Our Redeemer's many New Testament kindnesses to them.

My own view is that beggars are part of the rich human tapestry of grunge of every real, cosmopolitan metropolis. Some of us who have no beggars at our local shopping centres rather envy those of you who do. Salubrious Manuka seems to have vastly more than its fair share, just as that privileged neighbourhood's burghers have more than their fair share of everything.

What's more, whether the stories of hardship the beggars tell us are true or not these storytellers are almost certainly folk of disadvantage. They have somehow somehow not been able to get into and/or stay in the safe, plush, salaried, superannuated grooves lucky people spend their lives in. Liars may be honestly, truly desperate. There, methinks, but for the grace of God, go those of us who have achieved burgherdom. This columnist, though a pillar of society today, owns up to having occasionally teetered on the brinks of life's gutters.

One correspondent on this subject who did show some rare warmth reports to Gang-gang an eventful confrontation on his doorstep.

"My tale is not so much about aggressive begging as it is about how desperate some people become and the lengths they will go to to get some money. Lying in bed one night a few months ago at around 11.30pm I heard a knock on the door. Not used to having visitors at these hours as my wife is a shift worker and I normally go to bed pretty early as well, I got up and opened the door to find a man who would have been in his mid 20s. He regaled me with a tale of woe..."

Our correspondents' response to the tale seems to have been patient and kindly but without him being gullible enough to cough up any money. The tale spun to him and related to us reads rather like a fine work of fiction and is certainly more plausible than the plots of Home And Away. It involves, mysteriously, as so many of these reported tales seem to do, an urgent need to get to fabled Yass.

Afterwards our correspondent mused, humanely, to himself and then to us, that "It saddens me deeply that some people need to go to these lengths just to get by, and I am not one to judge about alcohol or drugs or any other form of addiction as I have seen my fair share of it from good and bad people. Surely in a society as well-off as ours we can look after our needy. But how a person ends up in that situation is another question entirely and I don't have those answers."