"The Sir thing", he said, explaining why he didn’t want a knighthood, "perpetuates one of our diseases in England, which is snobbery".

"I think we should all be Misters together."

When and if I am offered a major Australian honour I know that I will instinctively decline it and that in doing this dear Albert, and other great Britons who have declined knighthoods, will be my partial role models.

Yes, I know that the Australian honours system is only a cousin of the British one but there are still some snobbery-tinged similarities.

British knighthoods, over and above the way they promote snobbery (shame, shame upon Australia’s governor-general Sir Peter Cosgrove for leaping to accept an imperial honour from the pommy snobmongers) have been devalued and made ludicrous by the way they are sprinkled among people of few if any accomplishments. British sportsmen get them for being terribly good at tennis, badminton or cycling. British celebrities are given knighthoods for being famous.

So many Australians seem to get top gongs (as just revealed again in the Australia Day honours) just for having had long, long careers doing just one thing. By doing this they are said to have achieved "services to" whatever profession they have so unimaginatively wallowed in for ever and ever. In the event of my being offered an honour (although of course they are never offered to prickly, contrary folk like me) I suppose it will be suggested I have given "services to" journalism. But in truth it has been dear journalism (which I have loved so much that it never seemed like work) that has given services to me.

Then, too, AOs have been devalued, for me, by the occasional awarding of them to people who don’t float my gondola. One of them is the unpleasant, gibbering broadcaster Alan 'The Parrot' Jones. An award fitting for someone like Jones can never be a good fit for someone like me.

A list of Australians who have declined an AO would be very revealing but I've not been able to find one. By contrast a list of Britons too principled and dignified to accept a tinsel knighthood is readily available online. What a distinguished, accomplished cohort it is! It includes David Bowie, Stephen Hawking and Francis Crick (the co-discoverer of DNA), and, like Albert Finney a man of proud working-class stock, David Hockney the truly wonderful painter.

I have been vox-popping the abundant wild creatures in my Woden garden and neighbourhood to find what they make of the anti-drone protesters of Bonython.

"Can the Bonython disgruntled possibly be telling the truth," I ask the critters, "when they claim that the drone trial in their suburb drove the wildlife away?"

"Some of them have previously claimed in Letters to the Editor that all of Bonython’s wildlife fled in terror from the drones. Now Wednesday’s Canberra Times reports that in a 34-page submission to an ACT Assembly inquiry into drone technology two leaders of the Bonython residents’ group seething against the trial seethe that "'Whilst the main immediate issue with the drones was the noise, the loss of wildlife and birds [sic] in the area was also significant. This was reported by many residents.'"

The reactions of my vox-popped creatures have ranged from scepticism (especially among the snakes and lizards) to (especially among the birds) outright derision. They all said they have furred or feathered relatives in Bonython who didn’t turn a hair or a feather during the trial.

"Ian, I won’t say that the Bonython NIMBYs are actually lying," my garden’s senior Australian raven mused.

"It’s probably more that being typical NIMBYs and getting feverish about their cause, their fevered imaginations have run away with them and convinced them of what they want to believe. If the Assembly inquiry asks the frenzied Bonythoners to produce some actual proof, some actual facts to support the wildlife-fleeing-in-terror stories they, the frenzied, simply won’t be able to do it. Their reports of a birdless Bonython are fake news, fake twitching."

"Canberra’s NIMBYs are always like that, Ian. In their fear of the new, of change, they catastrophize. They become slaves of their brains’ revved-up amygdalas."

I tend to agree with the raven (and how like a raven, so eerily intelligent, to even know something about human neuroanatomy!)

And once again, the sheer fertility of the Canberra NIMBY imagination has me dreaming of a Chief Minister’s NIMBYs Only Literary Award. NIMBYs would be encouraged, while their minds are so creatively revved-up (giving them, temporarily, the wild-eyed gifts of a fairystory-inventing Hans Christian Andersen) to write their socks off with short stories, poetry, plays, operas, everything.

Creative inspiration is such a fleeting thing it seems a crime to waste it. Already, in the claims that all of Bonython’s wildlife has fled, leaving the suburb deathly quiet like the environmentally ruined Earth of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, we surely see the seeds of a powerful work of science fiction.

It’s over to you, Chief Minister Barr. With your $100,000 NIMBYs only literary award the territory would at last make some lasting, arts-boosting use of Canberrans’ best-in-the-world talent for NIMBYism.