We are living in statue-toppling, statue-defacing times, and so can imagine a Howard statue, if installed, one day attracting topplers and defacers.

During his prime ministership John Gorton did little to make any Australians remember him with topple-inclining loathing; and in any case the new statue of him depicts him endearingly fondling his endearing collie-kelpie dog Suzie Q. One would have to be unusually politically embittered to topple or deface a statue of a dog lover with his dog. I know I couldn't do it.

But there was lots for decent Australians to loathe about John Howard's interminable, soul-shrivelling prime ministership. His indecencies included his lickspittle devotion to US president George W. Bush (requiring us to join in the mad, wicked invasion of Iraq) and his shameful creation and political exploitation ("They threw their children overboard!") of the Tampa affair.

I am not a statue-toppler, but, often walking my dear dog in the parliamentary zone, I can imagine not bothering to restrain him when and if he seeks to express himself politically by urinating against John Howard's bronze shanks.

Engaging statues of the parliamentary zone include Peter Corlett's pairing, from a 1945 photograph, of John Curtin (Australia's 14th prime minister) and his treasurer Ben Chifley (destined to become Australia's sixteenth prime minister). They are walking, talking together, on their way from the nearby Kurrajong Hotel to their parliament house (now Old Parliament House) workplace.

Yes they are talking together, but what are they talking about?

Eavesdropping on them earlier this week I found them being scathing about Scott Morrison and sounding sincerely shocked about sordid goings-on up at the new parliament. Yet, as fair-minded and intelligent men, both were freely admitting that their old parliament house's culture was so unlike the culture of the present one (both blushed, bronzely, to remember how their parliament had no female parliamentarians) that they were in no position to pretend they had served in a golden parliament in a golden age.

Of course it is to poets that we owe the insight that the figures in figurative artworks have feelings and have things to say. And, pursuing my popular campaign to have my city create a post of City Poet (a kind of city laureate of the kind enjoyed by every self-respecting city in the USA and the UK) I point out that one of the star paintings in the National Gallery of Australia's current blockbuster Botticelli to Van Gogh exhibition is the subject of a very, very funny and incisive poem.

The poem has the three figures in it each taking a turn to tell us of their feelings. The painting is the Saint George and the Dragon by Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) and the poem about it is Not My Best Side by the witty and waspish Ursula Askham Fanthorpe (1929-2009).

We can't reproduce Fanthorpe's poem here because, giving all three protagonists in the painting, St George, the damsel in distress (who we find is not really in distress after all, and who is a pragmatic young woman with a feminist's independence of mind) and the dragon each an extensive chance to say what's on their minds, it is quite long.

But for example the dragon complains that the artist has not captured his, the dragon's, best side.

The damsel, as mentioned, offers feminist insights about a damsel's lot in life.

The knight, St George, has tickets on himself and will strike readers of us as an insufferably sexist blokey fop and bighead of the kind familiar in Australian public life.

"I have diplomas in Dragon Management and Virgin Reclamation, My horse is the latest model, You can't do better than me," he brags.

So check out the poem ye MLAs and other ACT movers and shakers. When, inevitably, it delights you, open your minds to what accomplished City Poet poetrymongers might do to cheer up the life and soul of our sometimes stagnant city.

Any day now I am going to the aforementioned Botticelli to van Gogh exhibition and had been looking forward to taking the Fanthorpe poem right up to Uccello's masterpiece so as to read it to the painting's characters.

MORE IAN WARDEN:

But now I find in the small, blue print of my ticket that one is only allowed an hour (an hour!) at this exhibition of 61 works, when my gallery-going instincts have me more inclined to need an appreciative hour at each painting. One imagines, then, it will be a vulgar hour of being jostled by those who have the bucket-list ambition of being able to say they saw, however fleetingly, all 61 works.

I am strongly tempted not to really go to the NGA scrum but to instead go online to have a virtual ogle at every work, taking as long as I like to look at and read about them.

And what if, just as one is doing good by respectfully leaving tourist-exhausted places alone, the right thing to do by celebrity paintings is to give them a break from madding, gibbering, jostling, selfie-taking crowds?

What if van Gogh's Sunflowers are figuratively wilting in their vase from being so relentlessly, witheringly stared at?

What if the The Virgin and Child in Domenico Ghirlandaio's painting of them in the NGA exhibition are yearning for some privacy, some time alone together?

Should the sensitive, kindly art-lover stay away from Botticelli to Van Gogh?