Thursday's luminous column looked at the No Airport Arms Ads (NAAA) campaign. Convened by Dr Sue Wareham it has been generated by Canberrans who believe that people visiting and returning to Canberra really ought to be greeted, in this space, by something much more Canberran and much less awful than the advertisements of international armsmongers. What if, instead, this space pulsated with images and objects redolent of our dear city's natural and cultural uniqueness?

To assist the hitherto inexplicably unimaginative owners of Canberra Airport to do better we began on Thursday to offer them some ideas. That column invited well-travelled Canberrans to tell us of airports they know of that are showing some sparkle in these matters.

To get things rolling your columnist pointed to two airports, one in polarbeary subArctic Canada and the other in even polarbearier Arctic Norway, where the baggage pickup areas sport wondrous life-sized effigies of polar bears. Our point was that just as these airports use their arrivals areas to say something about the Nature of the place that travellers have arrived in, our airport might do the same. After all ours is a uniquely bushy Bush Capital.

Now readers have begun to oblige with some terrific ideas. We hope the caliphs of Canberra Airport will be stimulated by them.

"You asked for airports with arrival halls that delight," Susanne Roberts responds.

"Well, Arlanda Airport near my home town Stockholm has just such a hall – a Hall of Fame, lined with lovely portraits of people from all walks of life, captioned 'Welcome to my home town.' How lovely! Imagine the wonderful Canberrans who could figure in our walk of fame – Nobel Prize winner Brian Schmidt, winemaker Ken Helm, etc. etc."

Yes, Arlanda's airport Hall of Fame, displayed in the arrival halls in Terminals 2 and 5, is well worth an online stickybeak. The arrival halls are lined with portraits of Stockholm's teeming famous (ABBA is there of course) and likely-to-be-famous. Importantly, too, they almost all seem to be the living famous, warning us away (when and if we imitate Arlanda) from the famous Canberra tendency to only celebrate the decomposing. And almost every portrait at Arlanda is, as is appropriate for a display that is welcoming travellers, smiling out at us. Not a hatchet-faced fogey in sight.

And Arlanda's Hall of Fame is gorgeously inclusive. It embraces everyone from a scarred and craggy ice hockey legend to a young and bejewelled rap and hip hop damsel, to a youngish female brain researcher (in her wittily-posed photograph she holds a brain in her hand as if it is a fashion accessory). Just imagine, Canberrans, the deserving Canberrans, so many of them refreshingly young and fresh-faced, who would deserve a guernsey in our airport equivalent of what Arlanda does.

The Arlanda movers and shakers trill that "Stockholm Hall of Fame is an exhibition welcoming travellers to Sweden and Stockholm".

"It has greeted travellers since 2005 and has just been updated with many new portraits. It is a welcoming exhibition. Arlanda is for many international travellers their first impression of Stockholm and Sweden. The Stockholm Hall of Fame exhibition gives international visitors a positive start to their stay and returning Swedes can feel proud of their country and capital city."

How Swede it is, how exuberant Arlanda's way of decorating its arrivals halls. By contrast how grim, unimaginative and unpleasant our chosen way of decorating (for the time being, until exuberance has its day) Canberra's arrivals space. Canberra, it is time for us to find and embrace our inner Swede.

Dr Wareham has suggested that instead of the airport's arrival area being decorated with pictures of armsmongers' death-dealing submarines and fighter jets we should have pictures of Canberra's attractions.

We agree with this while just discovering, with a pang of sadness, that Canberra long ago lost a glittering attraction. It was the Government Hog Farm.

ArchivesACT has just dusted off, as its Find Of The Month, files all about the tragically lost Hog Farm.

Once upon a time it was a tourist attraction of enormous promise. There was a glowing, pig-framed account of it in the 1934 publication Canberra: A City of Flowers; Official Tourist Guide to Australia's National Capital.

"Cleanliness is next to Godliness," the item trumpeted, "and Sunshine and Health are the biggest factors in Life - therefore, when you visit Canberra be sure to include in your itinerary a visit to the Government Hog Farm ... where Stud Farms Ltd is breeding Large White pedigreed pigs ..."

"Ideally situated on Mount Ainslie's grassy lea, where sunlight riots over grass and tree, you will find demonstrated here the most modern and hygienic methods of open-air pig raising, and can spend beneficially an hour or two studying Canberra's newest, and - what eventually will be - the National Capital's greatest industry."

By the sound of it, had the Hog Farm survived (alas it was closed down by the Department of the Interior in 1956) today it would be eclipsing Floriade as a tourist attraction. For who would bother to go to see vulgar displays of gaudy tulips and sickly-smelling hyacinths when, instead, they could go and marvel at naturally aromatic Fat White pigs gambolling in an idyllic place where sunlight riots?

During the Great War it suited 'our side' to propagandise that all Germans were sub-human and crazed. One hundred years ago this week Sydney's Globe and Sunday Times War News offered the item "Nation [Germany] of fanatics bent on destroying Britain. Germany from the inside." The story contained a portrait of fanatical German womanhood.

"The German women are even more determined than the men that the war shall end victoriously for the Fatherland. I found the men mad on the war and the women fanatical.

"Women who have lost two or three sons in the war stifle their grief and no sadness is visible on their faces. 'Deutsche Frauen weinen nicht!' (German women do not weep) they exclaim. They are proud to have given their loved ones to the Fatherland.

"Every woman who was engaged before the war married before her sweetheart went out. If he is still alive she knits all day for him and stints herself for him to send him tobacco or some delicacy. In the Winter he has socks and mufflers from her; in the Summer changes of underclothing. They call these presents to the troops 'liebes gaben' (love gifts). When they write to their husbands they are not allowed to mention any domestic worries for fear of dispiriting them.

"The women don't trouble about the fashions. They have no money to spend on new clothes, and anyway, having given everything to the Fatherland, they feel it would be unseemly to show the least sign of extravagance."