Flowers wither and die (which is all that saves us, thank goodness, from the horror of a year-long Floriade) and the bridal bouquet that the gasp-makingly lovely and elegant Jean Valentine bore at her wedding in 1935 has long since withered away. But now it has been eerily, ghostily, virtually resurrected to be part of the Centenary of Floral Art in Canberra exhibition at the Canberra Centre.
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The display is the work of the Floral Art Guild of the ACT and Jean Valentine was the aunt of one of the guild's members. Now another guild member, Marie Lenon, Australia's national bouquet-making champion from 1995 to 2000 (she's even represented us overseas and trounced the rest of the field at a kind of bouquet-making World Cup in Canada) has painstakingly and artistically made a representation of the 1935 bouquet.
An exact replica hasn't been possible, Lenon explained as we stood before her ghostily white and faintly perfumed creation, because the photograph of the 1935 creation isn't quite clear enough.
''It's hard to discern what the flowers [in the photograph] are. You can see roses in it, and there's a daisy of some sort, but in those days lots of these wedding bouquets were made from whatever people had in their gardens. And so I've done my best. I've used roses and chrysanthemums and carnations and gladioli.''
The gladdies used here so aesthetically by Lenon, discreet and ghostily white, would disappoint our nation's great gladdietrix Dame Edna Everage, who always favoured (using them in her stage shows) gladdies with the lurid colours of Sir Les Patterson's neckties.
- The Centenary of Floral Art in Canberra continues until Thursday on the first level of the Canberra Centre.
How ACT would get Turner to see the light
Transported by magic to this city in our centenary year, what Canberra scenes would the great J.M.W. Turner (celebrated in the block-splintering Turner From The Tate exhibition under way at the National Gallery of Australia) be eager to paint?
ABC Radio National's Breakfast current affairs program, with an idea we wish we'd thought of first, is asking its listeners to imagine Australian scenes they dearly wish Turner could be with us today to tackle in his inimitable way.
One of the entries read out last week imagined that Turner would leap at the chance to ''explore the natural beauties of Lake Burley Griffin at sunrise or sunset'' and that the ''clarity of the air'' in Canberra would have excited and inspired him, the master of the painting of light.
Readers, what Canberran subjects would you point the great man to?
The subject he would surely find irresistible, a subject all Canberra painters ignore to their enormous shame, is Summernats and especially, as the great master of the depiction of combinations of fog, smoke, cloud, haze and light (for example see his The Thames Above Waterloo Bridge in the the blockbuster) Summernats' fabled burnouts.
We think we can see from the work of Canberra Times photographers, who take brilliantly Turneresque photographs of the burnouts, that they are already subconsciously influenced by him.
Inequity in the booting of a ball
Your columnist's inner socialist had already talked me into boycotting this week's meaningless A League All Stars versus Manchester United game at Sydney's Olympic Stadium. And so it's been reassuring to hear my socialist anti-United feelings being subconsciously endorsed by the inner-Lenin lurking within Andrew Leigh, the member for Fraser.
Discussing his new book Battlers and Billionaires (his scholarly rage against the yawning chasm between the richest and the poorest) on the radio, he used a sporting analogy to show why inequity matters.
''Let's compare,'' his inner-Engels invited listeners, ''the AFL and the EPL [English Premier League] over the last 20 years.''
''The EPL has seen one team, Manchester United, win [finish top of the league] on 12 out of the last 20 seasons. In the AFL no team has won the league more than three out of the 20 seasons. And there are structural reasons why that's so. In the EPL each team gets to keep the TV revenues, in AFL they're shared. In AFL, they have salary caps but in the EPL you can spend whatever you like on salaries.''
Yes, Manchester United's Wayne Rooney is paid £250,000 ($416,000) a week!
All of this, Leigh insisted, makes AFL football competitions ''more egalitarian'' and ''more interesting'' than what happens in the EPL, and teaches us lessons about what's egalitarian. Yes, even before a ball is booted in the next EPL season we know that Manchester United, enjoying all the success money can buy, will win or almost win the league.
This columnist is by East Anglian birth a lifelong supporter of plucky, working-class EPL side Norwich City. Whenever my beloved Canaries play Manchester United each individual United megastar has cost United more than has been spent on the Canaries' whole team! Sport, and life, were not meant to be like that.
