More of the venerable Gale, who has some claim to be ''The Father Of Canberra'' (as it says on his statue in Queanbeyan) in just a moment.

Of course locavorism isn't the natural state of things now. In its report Food Mile Facts the Australian Conservation Foundation has agonised that ''the total distance travelled by 29 of our most common food items is 70,803 kilometres - that's nearly two times the distance around the Earth!'' Other famous food miles calculations include that in the United States, the food for a typical meal has travelled nearly 2100 kilometres. Perhaps the most-employed food miles statistic is about that now legendary 240 millilitre carton of yoghurt that has to travel 9000 kilometres to arrive on a shelf in Berlin.

But when John Gale and others were evangelising for Canberra as the federal capital site (from the very late 1890s until their campaign bore fruit in 1908 and 1909) it was a part of their case that a city at Canberra would be easily fed with food that would be grown in its amazingly fertile and productive neighbourhood.

We get a first glimpse of their agricultural and horticultural evangelisings from what they told Commissioner Alexander when he visited Queanbeyan on 11 June, 1900.

Oliver had been appointed by the NSW government in 1899 to begin looking for appropriate NSW places where federated Australia's federal capital territory might be. It was going to have to be in NSW, and had to be at least 100 miles from Sydney. Oliver criss-crossed inland, elevated NSW looking at places and also went to some towns and villages to conduct public hearings. At those hearings locals told him (much to his amusement, he reported later) fibs explaining why their site was the perfect paradise for the city.

At the Queanbeyan hearing lots of the praises sung about the Canberra site were to do with how readily, thanks to the wonders of the local climate and soils, the city there would be fed.

And so for example the squire-like Frederick Campbell of Yarralumla testified that even an enormous metropolis of 40,000 at Canberra would be easily fed. Why, he'd known yields of 60 bushels of wheat to the acre here and had found that as well as local grasses being ''remarkably fattening for sheep and cattle'' you could grow everything here that was grown in the south of England including ''quinces, apricots, apples, peaches, loquats, gooseberries and table grapes''.

The green-fingered Gale told the commissioner that he had ''grown nearly every species of English fruit'' in his Queanbeyan garden and that his table grapes always won first prize at the Sydney Agricultural Show. A city at Canberra, then, was imagined as a metropolis of sleek people whose food wouldn't travel very many miles at all.

John Gale will get lots of guernseys in this column in coming months as our Centenary year looms but it worries your columnist that he may not get the official limelight he deserves. For now Queanbeyan has Peter Corlett's super statue of him (outside the Court House at the intersection of Lowe and Monaro streets). It does justice to his fine old bearded head, so reminiscent of the way Moses is depicted in the paintings of the old masters.

But as far as I've been able to find out he's not yet on the radar of Centenary Creative Director Robyn Archer, and there are no plans to honour him.

Can this be! He was so very important to the plonking of the federal capital city where it has been plonked.

What's more, living for so long, he was a presence right across the spell we'll be thinking of in 2013. Decades before Federation was dreamed of he ascended Kurrajong Hill (where the new Parliament House is) and imagined the panorama below him (with the Molonglo trickling through it) as a God-given site for a fine city. Then later he pushed and pushed for a Canberra federal site and then, triumphant in that, attended the 1913 naming ceremony as, in his 80s, perhaps the oldest newspaper reporter in the Empire. His report of the occasion was bright and sparkling and atmospheric. Then, incredibly, he was still able to totter along (with the help of a motor car and driver to bring him from Queanbeyan) to the opening of Parliament House in 1927.

It is a scandal that he's not already honoured in Canberra in some significant way. There is a Gale Place in Downer but it honours astronomer William Gale who, while John Gale was going about the useful work of discovering a site for the federal capital city here on Earth, was making inconsequential new discoveries of places on the planet Mars.

How are we to explain this city's failure to honour John Gale unless it is just another manifestation of Canberrans' still-virulent anti-Queanbeyan snobbery?

If any readers know of ways that are planned to honour him in 2013 or have bright ideas of ways in which the powers that be might honour him then Gang-gang would love to hear about them.