Gang-gang: Where eagles (and street machines) dare

Its annual fleeting, sneeze-and-you'll-miss-it, tightly corseted little excursion down into the CBD and back again always seems such a waste.

We wouldn't want its route to include the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve – where it might disturb wedgies like the one in our picture – but there are some uneventful suburbs that might be awoken, gratefully, from the dead by having the City Cruise growl through them.

We bet the fun-loving, progressive Yarralumla Residents Association would love the procession to dawdle, roaring, in Yarralumla's mansion-lined streets.

Back to the City Cruise in a moment but first to our dramatic picture of a wedge-tailed eagle. It is the latest in our controversial occasional series of readers' pictures of ACT wildlife behaving wildly.

On the afternoon of New Year's Eve, natural-history photographer John Bundock was taking some Korean visitors into the the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve. An eagle with its just-obtained cockatoo posed for a moment in a tree beside the road and "then took off to enjoy its lunch away from public gaze".

magazine's Pseuds' Corner yet again for a sentence like that. But no one reads Private Eye today and so pseuds like this pretentious columnist are safe.)

The City Cruise needs some democratic, whole-of-city-sharing reforms, but meanwhile how welcome Summernats is in our city! It is character building for Canberra and adds to the rich complexity and variety of life here. That so many Canberrans despise it and whinge about it says lots about us.

For, yes, 2014 in Canberra was another year in a First World paradise, but is that paradise a city, yet? Or is Canberra still only a small, wriggly little town?

Citydom isn't a simple matter of being city sized, but of how a place feels, and thinks and acts. Charles Landry, the analyst of cities (several of the world's brightest cities hire him to think and natter about them), distinguishes between "city thinking" and "town thinking". He praises city thinking for its confidence, daring, and readiness to say yes a lot. Meanwhile town thinking for him is timid, habitual, stale and regulation loving, and is always saying no to possibilities, to change.

After his spell as Perth's thinker in residence (stirrer in residence might have been a more appropriate title), he diagnosed that Perth was a place half-trying to become a city and yet finding itself hornswoggled by town thinking. He found that "attitudes and a mindset have sedimented into Perth's collective mind". His prodding, poking final report Perth: Town Or City? seemed very like the set of conclusions he would have come to about Canberra if we were ever city-minded enough to hire him as our stirrer in residence.

But of course it is a measure of what a small town we still are, still lacking a real city's imaginative oomph and self-esteem, that we (perhaps like Wagga-Wagga, like Gympie) would never tolerate the dream of hiring a thinker-stirrer.

Last year saw us inching towards citydom (for example, at last we have a real city's airport), but the forces of town thinking are still mighty here. A 'No!' was shrilled umpteen times in 2014 (just as Canberrans once shrilled it at the visionary, city-thinking concept of self-government). Shrilled-at 2014 targets included not just light rail but every proposal for a building taller than a toadstool, and every change that threatened a smug old suburb with any change. The city suburbs' residents associations were, as usual, branch stacked by dynamic fogeys who think of change as a kind of societal Ebola.

Canberra is still too town-like, too Gympieish, to have a thinker-stirrer in residence because, for a start, he or she would cost money to hire. Small-town thinkers always get their knickers into knots about the costs of things and especially, in 2014, of light rail. But city-thinking folk know the sheer joy of spending and buying (of shopping), and get as great a kick out of shopping to buy a city a nice light railway system as they do out of buying a loved one some expensive shoes or a pedigree puppy.

But public spending on buying a city nice things horrifies town-thinking miserabilists. Should our new Chief Minister even suggest paying a Charles Landryesque thinker-stirrer a petty-cash $50,000 to come and stir us up, town-thinking tumults would erupt in all the familiar miserabilist places, notably the miserably Liberal benches of the ACT assembly and the troglodyte-dominated Letters page of this paper.

How both those venues would throb with horror not only at the cost but also with indignation that an "outsider" should offer us ideas about how we might be better. But in a grown-up city with healthy self-esteem, the fact of the thinker-stirrer being a fresh-eyed outsider seems essential, and like fun. A Martian would be perfect.

When Canberra is ready for a Charles Landryesque ideasmonger to move in with us for a couple of stirring months, we will know we are city material at last.