Ian Warden

For Canberra's great day in the sun, we give thanks

Ian Warden In the co-operative spirit of our centenary year I yield this week's column to the Reverend Nigel Boloco and to an important pro-Canberra sermon he gave last Sunday - ''Canberra.

Ian Warden

Cue music as I stride determinedly towards my desk

Ian Warden I gave the movie Lincoln only three stars. But it would have got four if it hadn't used John Williams' music.

Benedict a Dawkins adherent? Dare I dream?

Ian Warden Only half-awake when I heard the radio news headline that the Pope had ''resigned'', I burrowed my atheistic head back into my pillow. Then I had a half-dream/half-fantasy about what this might mean.

Ian Warden

On horticultural man-eaters and terrors from space

Ian Warden Every Canberra gardener unorthodox enough to have some of the flora of his or her own continent in the garden will be sobered, perhaps even left a little ivory-faced, by Joan Webster's essay in last...

A quiet love

Ian Warden ''Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries, because you were born in it.''George Bernard Shaw

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Ian Warden

I like them, they are the jewellery of grown-up cities

Ian Warden While liberating Canberra's skyline from the tired old tyranny of trees, Manuka Oval's new light towers do themselves look dainty enough to flutter in a breeze.

The birds much prefer Blandfordia to bland Gungahlin

Ian Warden ''Yum! Gosh this is good!'' rejoiced the red wattlebird between plungings of its beak into the flowers of the Christmas bells in my garden.

Ian Warden

Les Miserables simply the entree to an orgy of false reality

Ian Warden Les Miserables is an interesting test for those of us who like to think of ourselves as rational, intellectually detached folk.

Ian Warden

It's back - with not one but many un-Australians of the Year

Ian Warden Tremble, ye blackguards, hypocrites, toadies and sycophants. As the days of the year dwindle down to a precious few I have decided to renew, on a whim, this column's award to the un-Australian of the...

Ian Warden

Panned passages on horizontal tango strike a chord

Ian Warden Reading the passages that have just won Nancy Huston this year's annual Bad Sex in Fiction award, I'm afraid I find myself quite liking them.

Ian Warden

Ponting offers age-old lesson in timing - he left it too late

Ian Warden ALL ageing men (and this columnist is 67) will sympathise with Ricky Ponting's ignominious ending to his great career.

There was harmony, discord and - wondrously - children

Ian Warden Reflections on last Saturday's Voices In The Forest occasion at the bosky and (on Saturday) balmy National Arboretum.

The tyranny of a city taken over by trees and their slaves

Ian Warden Arriving home, suddenly, after three weeks in startlingly people-teeming Shanghai and then in fairly people-teeming Denver (in mountain-bedecked Colorado), Canberra feels shockingly underpopulated.

A bunyip's breakfast made of her name, alas poor Marion

Ian Warden My weekly psychic contacts with Marion Mahony Griffin are usually a lot of fun (as well as giving me a considerable edge over other Griffin scholars) but during last Thursday's seance I found her...

Ian Warden

Shockingly, a lack of ideas can be equally seductive

Ian Warden Young Liberals, the awful, post-pubescent species that invited Alan Jones to be its guest speaker at that now notorious dinner, have always made my flesh creep.

Ian Warden

Good to worse, and the putty between

Ian Warden While following the discussion among the media gibberati about Tony Abbott's alleged undergraduate indiscretion (punching a wall next to a terrified damsel's head) of 35 years ago, one seldom heard a...

Gang-gang

Been to the mountain top

Ian Warden John 'Yankee' Riddick (pictured at right) of Waramanga thinks that dogs are ''pretty neat'', and, if dogs were a little more articulate they'd surely bark the same thing about him.

Gang-gang

Honour walk's different strokes

Ian Warden There are some famous, even some household names on the list sent to Gang-gang of 22 of ''Queanbeyan's great achievers'' to be recognised in the Honour Walk that's to be opened on Friday in the...

Boomer angles

No matter how far I roam I still call Garran home

Ian Warden Once upon a time, my several million readers, you might have been impressed by my news that I'm counting the few sleeps before leaving for Shanghai.