A Gungahlin correspondent is following what she calls the "graffiti wars" going on at a local causeway. It is one of those Canberra places where there are expanses of bare concrete and where Territory and Municipal Services (TAMS) specifies, with explicit little logos, where spray-can artists may and may not express themselves.

What's going on, our Gungahlin arts correspondent notices, is that one spray-can artist is protesting at almost all of the causeway's vast concrete expanses being disallowed. Art is allowed in just one niche. He sprays art and protest notes and then TAMS keeps coming along and in our correspondent's word "beiging them out".

"TAMS seems determined and so does he," our correspondent observes, walking her dog there every day.

Our photograph shows a recent skirmish. The artist has had (probably only temporarily) the last word by writing "LEGALIZE ART" on a spot that the previous day had seen an illegal artwork beiged out.

A mild-mannered and reasonable spokesperson for TAMS we spoke to about this mused that this whole issue is really rather difficult because notions of what is art and what is just graffiti-vandalism are so very subjective.

But our Gungahlin correspondent thinks that it is mean-spirited to allow art in a tiny corner of the vast expanse. She's seen the TAMS men who do the beiging out and wonders, laughing, (imagining from the look of them they're more likely to be fans of the Raiders than of the National Gallery) how they judge what works are art to be left alone and vandalism to beiged out.

And now on to the Great War and to what Canberra's A Chorus of Women is calling its "radical rebalance of Australia's First World War commemoration".

Lots of that commemoration is already taking the form of extolling the unique heroism of our AIF men.

But, using its "Canberra-grown choral drama" A Passion for Peace, A Chorus of Women would like this season to also be a time for us "to ask vital questions about how to generate peace". The Great War after all at the time moved some to hope that the horror of it might at last shake some sense into our species so that we would never go to war again.

In A Passion for Peace Canberra composer-librettist Glenda Cloughley and musical director Johanna McBride will use choruses of 100 women and children to ask these "vital questions".

Doing some Devil's advocacy, we put it to Cloughley that her A Passion for Peace and the inaugural Festival for Peace, of which it will be the centrepiece, will be impossibly idealistic.

Surely, we challenged, all we know of our species shows we are innately belligerent, tribal and warlike? Then, of the sorts of people A Passion for Peace needs to persuade (such as lickspittle Australian prime ministers and leaders of oppositions who will always dutifully take us into any wars the warlike Americans invite us to join) surely none will come to the Festival? Won't its audience be made up of the usual wet, already converted, left-liberal Canberrans?

Cloughley points out that although the Festival is timed to coincide with the Anzac season it is not in any way an "opposition" to it and "is very respectful of Australian and New Zealand men who gave their lives".

What the Festival will say, she says, is that "our focus on military history has meant the effective silencing of lots of other voices that [on the subject of war and its impacts] are important".

As for the Devil's assertion that we are a warlike species, she insists that on the contrary "war is an aberration". Her work as a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist proceeds from the assumption that our natural, healthy state is a kind of "psychological maturity" that equips us to live at peace with one another.

But, the Devil persevered, didn't it fill her with despair that, for example, Australia's political leaders always want to embroil us in daft wars? Could she imagine our lickspittle Tony Abbotts and Bill Shortens refusing a US request to help invade anywhere on Earth?

But leaders will stop doing this, Cloughley answered the Devil, when the people will no longer put up with it. She says that the works of A Chorus of Women have always been aimed at the people.

Cloughley and the Chorus' musical director McBride testify that their young New Zealand and Hungarian grandfathers were both "broken by their experiences of war in opposing armies, one on Gallipoli and the battlefields of France, and the other as a lieutenant at 18 in the Austro-Hungarian army on the Russian front".

Cloughley says: "Our great-grandmothers and grandmothers nurtured and sustained their families' lives ... in spite of the trauma the men brought back from war. The Passion gives political relevance to the unsung stories of millions of women like our foremothers.

"It carries our hopes for our children and grandchildren as it tells the marvellous 100-year-old story of a worldwide web of women committed to peace and freedom who organised the only international peace conference of the First World War ... held during the same week as the Anzacs' Gallipoli landings ..."

Details of the looming Festival for Peace (April 28 to May 2) with its performances of A Passion for Peace are at www.chorusofwomen.org