The ACT Liberals' leader (whose name escapes me for the moment) has promised that if the Liberals are elected every child will be given a voucher to purchase a new tree to plant on their first day of kindergarten. The Liberals calculate that over the next 10 years this would see the ACT greenly festooned with more than a million new trees.

Coincidentally, just this week I heard ABC Radio National's venerable broadcaster Phillip Adams repeat his occasional thought that trees are so wonderful and important that "they should be given the vote".

I never hear the saintly Phillip say this without (of course wholeheartedly agreeing with him) thinking that the progressive, tree-hugging ACT holds the most promise of the first introduction of that electoral reform.

Perhaps, to try to counter the Liberals' green election head start, the Chief Minister could take a Votes For Trees! promise to October's election.

But how might a votes for trees dream become a reality? How could we find out from trees, notoriously reserved and disinclined to gibber mindlessly about their opinions (one of the many things we love about them, that inclines us to prefer them to people, to find them far more huggable) about who they do and don't want to vote for?

To make a start on this I propose that the ACT government appoint a taskforce (it will need to include distinguished poets, philosophers, political scientists, psephologists, botanists and at least one award-winning wizard) to look into how we can begin to talk to the trees about politics.

Meanwhile, in the spirit of the coming reform, here is an interim idea. What if every voter in the ACT who can show that he or she has personally assisted the cause of the territory's afforestation is given as many votes to cast on election day as he or she has planted trees? Readers, bear with me a moment while I go out and count the trees I've planted in my Canberra suburban garden.

[In the columnist's short absence let us listen to some appropriate music, Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, with its famous evocation of the idyllic, leafy outdoors].

The columnist returns, notebook in hand, his flaxen locks dishevelled by his suburb's zephyrs.

Thank you for your patience readers. My quick census shows that over the years I have planted 16 trees (mostly petite eucalypts such as Eucalyptus crenulata and the charismatically dishevelled-looking Eucalyptus neglecta) on my now distinctively bosky block. So under my proposal that would entitle me on October 17, election day, to 17 votes - my dear trees' plus my own.

I'm sorry I was out in my garden for so long (although it did enable you to listen to that uplifting music) but my trees seemed to detain me, and, the breeze in their leaves, to whisper their political preferences to me.

When (speed the day!) the ACT's trees are enfranchised, one wonders how the very old, very wise Irish Strawberry trees (Arbutus unedo) that surround my heritage (founded 1928) suburban tennis club will vote. One imagines their Irishness and their strawberriness will make for considerable ideological complexity.

Tennis and tennis clubs (I have played tennis and belonged to tennis clubs almost all my life) are much on my mind now.

It is not only the much-in-the-news story of Novak Djokovic's "boneheaded" (Nick Kyrgios' word for it) COVID-defying tennis event (leaving many infected). It is also the startling ideas that leap from a controversial new book* by David Berry on the history of tennis. Here is a little of a review of the book.

"[Berry shows how] though initially played in grand country houses, tennis soon migrated to cities and towns, where it appealed to middle-class people of an 'intellectual and artistic' bent. Such men were attracted to tennis, Berry suggests, largely because it released them from the stifling masculine codes of the day. On court, men could be more expressive than normal [for playing tennis is very like dancing]. This, I think, remains true today: 'manly' men rarely have much time for tennis."

Gosh! Can this be true? Can my lifelong love of playing tennis (and of never wanting to play rough, manly, hairy-chested sports like rugby) be yet another expression (along with flower-arranging and reading poetry) of my intellectual and artistic bent, my feminine side?

Then, I had always wondered why my dear tennis club (founded in 1928 and so traditional in so many ways) allows women to be members. Here's Berry's explanation of how a game so attractive to "effeminate men" was extended to women.

"Early tennis was of course also played by women ... There was a brief attempt, in the 1880s, to shut them out of tennis, but it was quickly rebuffed. One reason, interestingly, seems to have been a specific kind of self-interest on the part of male players: because tennis was considered an effeminate sport, it suited them to have women at clubs, to help allay suspicions about their sexuality."

Horror!

Will these face-ashening ideas about male tennis players rock the world of ACT tennis? Will Canberra's Nick Kyrgios, his famous intellectual and artistic bent appearing to confirm Berry's thesis, speak out?

*A People's History of Tennis by David Berry is published by Pluto.