Even a ryebuck shearer, used to working alone and unobserved, might be made nervous by a big, stickybeaking audience. Professional, ryebuck hairdresser Sarah Shannon of boho hair was very nervous, as, on Wednesday and in front of a crowd made up of a scary mix of librarians and media she worked on a client's head.
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"I was trembling," she confessed later.
"There are so many people here. No, I've never worked in front of an audience before. I'm just one-on-one usually."
She had an audience on Wednesday, on a National Library forecourt, because she was working on the celebrity head of National Library cataloguer Nicolette "Rapunzel" Suttor. Suttor, a ryebuck fund-raiser for the Leukaemia Foundation through its 2015 World's Greatest Shave, came to Wednesday's occasion with ankle-length hair and left it with her head shaved bare.
ABC radio's Louise Maher got this great shave underway by scissoring off what she called Suttor's "pony tail" (in Suttor's exceptional case more of a "horse tail" that would have looked appropriate on Phar Lap). Then the nervous, but accomplished, Shannon deftly shaved off the rest with an electrical device that quietly buzzed like a contented bumblebee. The media's busy cameras (wielded by ryebuck photographers) whirred and clicked.
With the shearing and the shave underway, Suttor explained that she was doing it "because it's worth it".
"It's worth it to raise money for the Leukaemia Foundation, its worth it [laughing] to get rid of all my hair and worth it because I want to [help fight] leukaemia and all cancers."
She had lost her cousin, just 18, to leukaemia, and felt strongly that medical science should have known enough to save him.
"We should have been able to do so. We should have had the technology, the medical solutions. But we don't have them, yet, and that's why I'm doing this, so that we can work to find a solution for leukaemia. And if not a solution then maybe at least just a treatment that works for more people."
Earlier, Suttor made a ceremonial arrival to great applause, and sat queen-like on a chair on a dais in bright sunshine and with the panoramic lakescape behind her. The sunlight picked out 50 shades of golden-brown in her hair. For photographers, she did all sorts of exciting things with her doomed mane, for when you have 1.4 metres of hair your repertoire of tricks can be quite extensive.
"Well, I've got to do something with this hair," she told an interviewer, just before the shearing. And the something she had done was to seek sponsorship from her impending shave to raise money for the Leukaemia Foundation. And talking about leukaemia, on Wednesday Suttor spoke with great determination and as if leukaemia was a personified Evil (a bit like Satan), to be taken on, fought, and defeated.
The transformation of Suttor's head was extraordinary. She got round after round of supportive applause from her library colleagues and cheerfulness prevailed all morning and yet, methought, there was a certain eeriness and even sadness about the ritual.
It had taken her 10 years to grow that mane and in less than 10 minutes it was removed, harvested to go for the making of wigs for cancer sufferers. At one point, like the photographers walking around her so as to sightsee her new head from various angles, I found her head perfectly framed by distant Mount Ainslie. What a contrast they made. Suttor's de-Rapunzled head alarmingly bare, Mount Ainslie gorgeously, greenly shaggy with leafy bushland. Suttor ran her fingers over her denuded head in laughing disbelief.
Her campaign has thus far raised (as of Wednesday) $5837, and a Leukaemia Foundation spokesperson at Wednesday's ceremony said that this amount could, for example, pay for 10 families to come and stay in Canberra while loved ones were undergoing cancer-battling treatments here.
This very day, 31 Australians will get the news they have blood cancer. Across Australia as you read this 60,000 people are struggling with blood cancers. To assist, you can go to Suttor's fund-raising page.
And from ryebuck shearers, ryebuck hairdressers and ryebuck fund-raisers we go to ryebuck Canberra wildlife photographer John Bundock, whose fine work often adorns this column.
Loyal readers will know that Monday's column reported that Canberra's beloved Australian magpies have been seen catching and eating Canberra's feared (their killer stings!) European wasps.
That essay was accompanied by a fine photograph of a (native) Dusky Woodswallow with an (introduced) European wasp in its beak. We did a little musing about some birds' dependence on flying insects as food and on how in Europe 133 bird species, including the bee eaters, have evolved to eat wasps.
John Bundock, reading this, has been quick to contribute pictures taken on Monday at Tidbinbilla of exquisite juvenile Rainbow Bee-eaters, one of them with a yummy Australian emperor dragonfly in its bill.
Bundock muses that, "Like lots of Canberra grey nomads these bee-eaters will soon be heading off to warmer climes during the Canberra winter. I can't find any reference to rainbow bee-eaters feasting on European wasps, but I presume they would relish the prospect."
"These photos were taken near the site of Gibraltar School and it's nice to think that the pupils, travelling to school on their ponies, might have rejoiced in such sights. Although [for Australian bee-keepers have always had an uneasy relationship with the species] if their parents had hives they might have perceived them as just another pest to be exterminated."
