Through this mass-circulation column I continue to campaign for the creation of the post of Canberra Poet Laureate or Canberra City Poet. In the United States and the UK every true city with any self-esteem, every city that dares to call itself a city has such a bard.
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Chief Minister, how long must this federal capital city, a city priding itself on its highly-educated progressiveness and sophistication, wait for you to act on this?
Canberra's fogs of recent days (Canberra is by far the foggiest of Australian cities and in a sense Fogs R Us) trigger the thought that when we are blessed with Canberra City Poets they will of course find inspiration in their city's unique fogliness.
There are many very fine poems about fogs, some of them celebrating what magical improvements fogs make to the looks of things (for even South.Point Tuggeranong can take on a fairytale appearance on foggy mornings) and some capturing fog's melancholy impacts on our emotions.
Here from his collection Winter Morning Walks is a fog poem by beloved US poet Ted Kooser. A former US Poet Laureate, Kooser lives in Nebraska where he sometimes in winter walks out in what he calls "bone-cracking cold".
When, oh when Canberra, will we have our own fog-appreciating laureate?
An early morning fog.
In fair weather, the shy past keeps its distance.
Old loves, old regrets, old humiliations
look on from afar. They stand back under the trees.
No one would think to look for them there.
But in fog they come closer. You can feel them
there by the road as you slowly walk past.
Still as fence posts they wait, dark and reproachful,
each stepping forward in turn.
Still on the theme of wintry weather - last weekend brought the federal capital city's first, scrotum-shrivellingly severe frost of the season. It required us to turn to our polar explorer wardrobes for the first time in months.
That flurry of wardrobe-fossicking coincides with publication of exciting new ideas about humans, the cold and clothing.
Up poppeth online, coinciding with last Saturday's capital frost, University of Sydney prehistorian Ian Gilligan's essay The Clothing Revolution. What if the need for fabric, not food, in the face of a changing climate, is what tipped humanity towards agriculture?
Some of Gilligan's piece's ideas have special resonance for Canberrans in particular because Australia's federal capital city was deliberately plonked in a place of proven winter chilliness.
Only sites with a "bracing" climate of some 100 brain-stimulating, health-giving (even if temporarily scrotum-challenging), putting-ice-on-the-birdbaths frosts a year got into the tournament of the competing sites. Canberra was not quite the coldest of the site finalists (methinks that may have been teeth-chatteringly bleak Dalgety) but it was polar enough and as well had other virtues to commend it.
And when for our 2013 centenary I was hired to research and write a little book about how the "battle" of the proposed federal capital city sites unfolded and was fought I found federal parliamentarians, insisting on a cold and bracing site, and praising peoples (for example the Scots and the Vikings) who had inventively risen to chillynesses challenges. There are echoes of that in Gilligan's piece, of which I now offer you an intellectually-tantalising taste.
MORE IAN WARDEN:
"Archaeologists and other scientists are beginning to unravel the story of our most intimate technology: clothing. They're learning when and why our ancestors first started to wear clothes, and how clothes' adoption was crucial to the evolutionary success of our ancestors when they faced climate change on a massive scale during the Pleistocene ice ages.
"These investigations [suggest that] after the last ice age, global warming prompted people in many areas to change their clothes, from animal hides to textiles. This change in clothing material, I suspect, could be what triggered one of the greatest changes in the life of humanity. Not food but clothing led to the agricultural revolution.
"My recent work shows that clothing wasn't just the unique adaptation of a more-or-less hairless mammal to the changing natural environments. The development of clothing led to innovations with many repercussions for humanity.
"A need for portable insulation from the cold in the Palaeolithic promoted major technological transitions. These include stone toolkits for working animal hides and, subsequently, bone tools such as pointed awls and needles to make tailored garments. Later, during the coldest stage of the last ice age, Homo sapiens in middle latitudes devised multi-layered outfits with an inner layer of underwear.
"Equipped with effective protection from wind chill, our species could penetrate into the frigid Arctic Circle, further north than cold-adapted Neanderthals had managed to venture. From the northeastern corner of Siberia, modern humans strolled across an exposed land bridge to enter Alaska by 15,000 years ago, if not earlier, to likely become the first hominins to set foot in the Americas. At the Broken Mammoth site in Alaska, archaeologists have unearthed the fragile technology that made the journey possible: a 13,000-year-old eyed needle."
Last weekend thousands of us more-or-less hairless Canberra mammals were enabled by our multi-layered outfits with an inner layer of underwear (all giving us effective protection from wind chill), were able to stroll along the Alaskan-feeling touchlines of Canberra's freezing footy fields.
Canberra's cold is usually held against it by the city's miserabilist detractors. So how one looks forward to Canberra City Poets' celebrations of Canberra's defining winter Alaskanicity and Nebraskaness, their songs of praise of Canberrans' plucky and inventive adaptations to the challenges of living in a place of bone-cracking cold.
- Ian Warden is a regular columnist.
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
