National pride in our cricketers ebbs and flows (for their form fluctuates and we are a capricious people) but national pride in our invention of that envy-of-the-world the Hills hoist rotary clothes line remains strong and constant.
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It is hard to imagine a more unique-to-Australia spectacle than a uniquely Australian Tawny Frogmouth perched on a uniquely Australian Hills hoist and so no wonder four chaps in an Ainslie backyard were very excited when they saw it a few nights ago.
"It was a table tennis night in the backyard of our friend Richard's house," Mark Williams reports, "and four of us were having a chat between games."
"The sky was clear. I heard a swooping sound and out of the corner of my eye I saw a bird fly down on to the Hills hoist beside us. I grabbed my phone and took a photo. He didn't fly off so I switched on the flash, approached a little closer and tried again. After a few minutes I got a little too close and he withdrew to the roof gutter. From there, seemingly empowered by his moon-silhouetted position, he stared at us for a few minutes longer before leaving us to carry on with our ping pong."
Mark Williams' photo is an understandably knockabout image but the fact of the wonderful bird being juxtaposed with average washing on an average hoist in an average Canberra backyard is a terrific symbol of what a bushy Bush Capital we are. When, inevitably, we change our disappointing (so very yesterday) ACT flag, the stylised image of a Tawny Frogmouth on a Hills hoist will capture perfectly our territory's uniqueness.
And while on flags and fowls, boldly change-embracing New Zealand is thinking seriously of adopting a new flag that dispenses with the anachronistic Union Jack and instead sports something utterly, recognisably New Zealandish. The masses have contributed their hundreds of designs and a panel is winnowing them down into a field of the very best.
Now, at once you imagine that New Zealand's dumpy, flightless national bird the Kiwi must be a natural candidate for the flag guernsey. But no! Professor John Burrows chair of the Flag Consideration Panel, says, his voice tinctured with regret, that in fact the Kiwi is not getting a Guernsey. He testifies that no matter how artists try to represent the kiwi for a flag it somehow comes out as just a blob with a beak. And so the objects on the proposed new flags are likely to be either a fern or the Southern Cross or (as pictured) a juxtaposition of both.
Enviable New Zealand! A country where the changing of a dated, far-too-British national flag can be rationally discussed and where even the prime minister supports that change. Imagine trying to get such a discussion underway here, now, during the reign of our Anglophile fossil of a PM.
Meanwhile, still on fowl play, readers continue to contribute welcome harbingers of Spring they've noticed, especially welcome after this really rather Norwegian, character-building Winter we've endured.
Holly Berry thanks us for raising the topic and rejoices "I live at Bungendore, and my first sign of the warmer weather is the song of a local Butcher Bird with his melodious call. Such a happy chap! He arrived yesterday [Sunday]."
On Sunday morning at the bird hot spot of Kambah Tennis Club what had seemed like two separate, terrestrially busy committees of White-winged Choughs suddenly merged. Every bird flew up to sit in a row on the top of the court fence beside us, as if to watch us playing singles. They sat shoulder-to-shoulder in a glossy black row of 16. So as not to shock them we suppressed for the moment any of our usual audible obscenities (we've imitated a few from our role model Nick Kyrgios).
In decades of informal Chough-watching and Chough-appreciating neither of us had ever seen anything like this. One is so used to seeing flocks of Choughs on the ground behaving like a disorganised rabble of individuals that to see them for once all in a disciplined row was eerie in the extreme.
Watching tennis may not be a regular Spring activity for these Choughs but we can be sure they were pausing in nest-making, an activity the species' whole troupe takes part in. The nest (always very high up a tree and on a vertical branch) is a wondrous object of mud and fibre you'd swear (if you saw it out of context on a bench in a school's pottery workshop) was made by promising pottery students.
And while we are out and about among the trees, reader Ron Walker has pricked up his ears at some our recent items.
"Your recent article about Wollemi pines and how they represent Australia around the world and the 70th anniversary of the A-bomb on Hiroshima bring to mind a little known fact. One of the trees closest to Ground Zero, at Hiroshima Castle, that survived the blast was a gum tree that must have come from Australia. It still weeps poetically over the moat of the former castle, a majestic emissary from our country, mourning the horror of that day."
Yes, that ambassadorial Eucalypt still stands there, alive and well-looking, just 740 metres from the epicentre of the blast. Let us hope it is not one of those killer "widow maker" Eucalypts the embarrassingly wooden-headed committee of the Assembly has just been talking nonsense about.
