Of course Donald Trump is proving to be an inspiration to street artists. And so here today, from the lively, up-to-the-minute blog of Ms Lovejoy is the very latest street art vision of him.
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Here he is portrayed as Humpty Dumpty (Humpty Trumpty?), falling from his seat atop the wall on which he has been painted. Perhaps the artist hopes that Trump will fall and shatter into smithereens and that then it will be impossible to put Trumpty together again.
Inexplicably, Canberra's street artists don't seem to have ever been inspired, yet, by Canberra's sporting heroes, and today's column's picture of Terry Campese taking a bath in lime green Raiders' milk is not a painting but a photograph. Our Jeffrey Chan took it in 2013.
And it is a photograph that has just taken on an extra historical significance. Some years hence young people will ask their oldies what on earth it is that Campese and the children are holding in their hands. The oldies will explain that once upon a time, in the olden days, Canberra's milk was sold in cardboard cartons. At this the youngsters will look at their oldies in disbelief, in the way in which, today, they look at us in disbelief when we tell them that once upon a time tennis was played with racquets made of wood, that there hasn't always been an internet, that the Australian Labor Party once actually stood for something, etc.etc.
Last week Canberra Milk (Capitol Chilled Foods (Australia) Pty Ltd) helped pay this columnist's wages by taking out a very large advertisement. It announced that it will no longer be selling milk in cartons. Instead there is to be a new one-litre PET bottle.
The cartons have had a small place in some Canberra hearts. This was not only because Canberra Milk used to publicise deserving causes on their waxen flanks but also because lots of Canberra's recycling-conscious gardeners used them (punching holes in the base) as stable and durable pots for seedlings.
We asked Canberra Milk's general manager David Tyack what was behind the change. He says there's been a combination of factors. For one thing "our carton machine is quite old and it breaks down" and it has alas been turning out the occasional carton that leaks.
Then, a survey of milk-buying customers revealed that they hanker for three things in a milk container, that it be re-sealable, that it be transparent so that you can see what's in it and that it springs no leaks. The cardboard containers, though ideal props in photographs of hairy-legged footballers taking milk baths, have been falling short of all these desires.
And while we are on the subject of athletes (like the milk-immersed Terry Campese) a reader pipes up that in all discussions of the wonderful life of Muhammad Ali there's been no mention of the Australian boxer who tangled with the great man.
At the Rome Olympics of 1960 and in the light heavyweight division Australian boxer, male model and rugby idol Tony Madigan biffed with Cassius Clay in the semi-finals. Madigan was only just outbiffed, Clay winning and going on to be too nimble (floating like a butterfly) for his opponent in the final.
Our mature-age reader remembers the fight from that time.
"My other [Ali] memory is of being in Manila at the time of the Thrilla [The Thrilla in Manila, the 1975 fight with Joe Frazier]. I was with a PNG delegation one of whom was very tall and well built with Afro hair. Everywhere we walked we were accompanied by urchins chanting 'Ali-Ali-Ali.' Poor marks for ethnic ID-ing!"
Using the miracle of Trove your columnist has unearthed a rather blush-making March 1960 Women's Weekly story about Tony Madigan. In it the Weekly, and Madigan in reported conversation, say some things we find politically incorrect today.
The introduction to the story A Model Boxer is harmless. It gushes that "Australia's handsome 30-year-old bachelor Tony Madigan is living the life of a latter-day Jekyll and Hyde in New York. In working hours he's one of the top-paid models [earning up to $40, nearly £A17, an hour]. In the evenings he's one of the most successful amateur boxers, hopeful of the [forthcoming] Olympics."
But in the story (illustrated by a photo of the Australian hunk in boxing gloves and boxing dressing gown and juxtaposed with a glamorous female model) our Tony says some unkind things about the female models he works with. No, he seldom dates them because "Let's face it, they are too skinny. I like a girl who looks like a girl!"
And the same young people who won't believe us when we say milk used to come in cartons won't believe us when we say that once upon a time athletes used to appear in cigarette commercials. In A Model Boxer the Weekly reports that our Tony is famous in the US in part because he is on TV every night seen by millions in commercials for "a large-selling cigarette".
Most blush-making of all (but we are guilty of "presentism" if we condemn things written and said yesterday that we too would have uttered in those times) is the Weekly's report that in the 1959 Golden Gloves final in Chicago our Tony was "outpointed by a clever young negro". Today we wouldn't mention his negritude but that clever young pugilist was Cassius Clay, destined to outbiff Tony Madigan again at the Rome Olympics.
