We run this tasty clickbait almost entirely as a gratuitous attempt to win this column more hits.

But our other purpose is to keep up our campaign for Canberra to imitate Poertschach and to inaugurate our own festival here as a tourist-attracting replacement for fading, waning Floriade. Our event could be called the Southern Hemisphere Bodypainting Festival. International tourists would come here for the festival in their teeming tens of thousands. What do you say, Chief Minister Barr?

Modestly, since this is my brainwave, I agree once the festival is established to being called The Father of the Bodypainting Festival in the same spirit (although in a superior sense) in which parliamentary fossil Philip Ruddock is dubbed the Father of the House.

Our Bodypainting Festival will inject millions of dollars of the decimal currency introduced in 1966 into the local economy. Which brings us, artfully, to a quaint development in our recent discussions of our nation's triumphant 1966 conversion from pounds, shillings and pence to dollars and cents. Look at our picture of a besmirched five cent piece, and see if you can guess (before we explain it below) what it is besmirched with. What has this dear little echidna endured?

To recap: as reported, one quite-well-known Canberran confessed to us (swearing us to keep her identity private) her Dark Secret. Her secret is that at the conversion time her mother, instead of heeding Treasury's 1966 demand that we not "hoard" and hang on to the old redundant coins, surreptitiously hoarded old sixpences and threepenny bits. She did this so as to be able to go on embedding the coins in traditional Christmas puddings. Her daughter confesses to having inherited those illicit coins, and to keeping them hoarded in a Vegemite jar until at every Yuletide they are brought out for their annual embeddings in her own 21st century Christmas puddings.

Now it emerges, unless the National Archives of Australia is playing an elaborate hoax on gullible me and gullible readers (for this story sounds so improbable) that at the time the government had elaborate laboratory tests of the incoming coins conducted to see if they, too, were pudding-appropriate.

And so the five cent piece in our picture (from the Archives' coin and pudding tests file) is encrusted, after a preliminary wipe, with some of the pudding mixture in which it had been forensically embedded for three months.

What happened, if the Archives' old Commonwealth Treasury file 1966/2616, Use of Decimal Coins in Christmas Puddings is real and not part of a hoax, is that Treasury really did engage with the issue of new coins in traditional puddings. It sought the expertise of the Copper and Brass Information Centre (CBIC). The CBIC employed the Sydney City Council Test Laboratories to do painstaking research, and the Laboratories (their voluminous and intricate test results are on the file) spent months doing an array of tests of what happened to all denominations of the new coins – and especially to the puddings – when new decimal coins went in the mix. The Laboratories used puddings both boiled and steamed, and looked at what happened when coins were pudding-embedded for one month, two months and three months.

Alas, the CBIC-sponsored experiments found that the new coins were not pudding friendly. The CBIC collaborated with Treasury in October 1966 (with Christmas looming) over the composition of a press release titled Don't Decimalise Your Christmas Pudding.

The release's message was that "The Christmas pudding-making season is almost upon us" but that, alas, with the coming of the new coins the "age-old custom" of putting coins in Christmas puddings and cakes was going to have to fade away and become "a quaint old custom of the past".

"The new five and 10 cent pieces are not a silver alloy, nor is the 20 cent piece. The metal alloy [cupro-nickel] from which they are made may turn green if they are cooked in a Christmas pudding and it [the chemical activity causing the greening seen in the experiments] could impart unpleasant flavours. The cooking of one and two cent coins in puddings [the laboratory had noticed these coins become an alarming "heavily shaded green"] could result in even stronger corrosion and should be avoided."

So while of course, Treasury and the CBIC pointed out, you could put the decimal coins in your cooked puddings just before you served them (not really in the spirit of the quaint old custom) "don't risk spoiling your Christmas – or your family – by cooking coins or other objects in your Christmas puddings and cakes".

We bring you this improbable-sounding saga (but trust us, for we are journalists) for two reasons.

One is to show how, in spite of our feeling that we are living in uniquely nannying Nanny State times, there was also some energetic nannying going on back in 1966 (the state protecting us from the slight risk of unpleasant-tasting puddings).

But secondly and less frivolously, the puddings' chapter of the decimal conversion story illustrates again the marvellous thoroughness with which the radical vision of reform of the currency was brought to fruition.

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. The Australia of the 1960s did this particular thing with aplomb.

Today our prime minister wants us all on the patriotic "team". Sydney's Australian Worker of 100 years ago this week reported that in patriotism-conscious 1915 it was a crime not to be a team player urging all men into khaki.

OPPONENT OF RECRUITING.

"For making statements likely to prejudice recruiting a man has been sentenced at Sydney to three months' imprisonment. Charles Jackson, 24, appeared on charges of having made statements likely to prejudice recruiting of His Majesty's forces in New South Wales, viz: 'The capitalist party is urging the workers to enlist, and go and kill their fellow-workers. They call men who have gone to the Dardanelles "heroes". I call them murderers.' "

Elsewhere in this edition the Worker asked "LITHGOW OR CANBERRA?"

"The Federal Government has a rare chance to prove its practical faith in the credo of community values. A proposal has been made that the Small Arms Factory should be removed from Lithgow to Canberra."

The Worker said the factory should go to Canberra because there the government already owned the land in the people's name. At Lithgow the government would have to buy land from "money grubbing opportunists" for £40 an acre.

"It was to secure to the Nation these Nation-made values that the Federal Capital area was appropriated. Is the Government going to invest this area with such values now that it has an unique chance of doing so? Or is it going to allow the wire-pullers and parish-pump politicians to retain them elsewhere for the benefit of Private Percenterprise?"