One of the many, many reasons for feeling proud of and optimistic about our city is that our street art, our laneway art (and our stormwater drain art) is getting better all the time. Some of it, now, is as metrosensational as the best anonymous art that decorates liberally graffiti-tattooed Melbourne. High praise indeed!
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The painting here on our page by a Leonardo of the laneways, of a little girl hurling a bucket of paint at a wall above a doorway, adorns a seldom-visited Canberra lane.
But not even wild horses, not even ASIO and its waterboardings will drag its whereabouts from me. The painting is not far from the anonymous door of a very secret, very exclusive club. It is a club only frequented by Canberra and the nation's most powerfully important movers and shakers (and so, needless to say, this columnist is a member). We don't want the paparazzi and gutter press to see our comings and goings.
But I have been teasing you, and it is time to sober this story up with some facts.
Fanatically loyal readers will know of this column's support for and delight in Sean Costello's Capital Yarns project. An enthusiastic Canberran and used to making up stories to tell his children (from things they told him they'd like stories about) he invited Canberrans everywhere to send him three Canberra-connected suggestions for him to weave into an original short story. So for example this columnist challenged him to write a story embracing Nicholas Milton the maestro of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra, Petri Pitkanen the Finnish superstar MVP goalkeeper of the CBR Brave ice hockey team, and the Gang-gang cockatoo. Costello rose to this with aplomb.
Now there is, in time for Christmas, and just the thing for Canberrans to give as Canberra-celebrating presents to non-Canberrans, the Capital Yarns book. It bristles with 15 of Costello's stories, and they in turn, bristle with such subjects as the Canberra Roller Derby League, the Gold Creek Lolly Shop, Namadgi's brumbies and unicorns, AFL football at Manuka Oval, the Birdman Rallies of the 1970s, the Starlight Drive-In at Watson (and a 1970s Valiant), Alexander Bunyip, the statue of Curtin and Chifley, the mists of Lake Burley Griffin and much, much more.
In one story Hashtag #CBR, the author weaves in a BBQ at Lennox Gardens, some hanging-out at Kingston Foreshore, and the precincts (nooks and crannies and laneways) of inner Canberra. And it is in this story that the real painting in our picture, on a wall in Tocumwal Lane, and the real doorway at which the child seems to be flinging her paint are married to a fictional account of what goes on in the room behind that door. The heroine, Traci, enters that mysterious place and through the gloom notices Ian Warden the famous newspaper columnist. Will she, like so many women before her, be drawn to him by his animal magnetism?
To be such an admirer of Capital Yarns, the blog and the book (the latter is illustrated and our paint-flinging moppet is one of the pictures) your somewhat bitter and twisted columnist (the Howard Years damaged so many of us!) has had to overcome the envy felt at not having this Big, Canberran Idea before Costello had it. But he has done it splendidly. A clodhopping writer would have made Capital Yarns a great embarrassment to our city (like the Yarralumla Residents Association) but Costello is a polished, readable yarnwright and shows our city as the complex, folkloric, unicorn-blessed place it really is.
Sean Costello's Capital Yarns is on sale now at discerning but sometimes hard-to-find bookshops, some of them down obscure inner-city laneways.
