If you could nominate a particular sound as the distinctive sound of Canberra, a kind of ACT aural emblem (in the way the Gang-gang cockatoo is our faunal emblem and the Royal Bluebell our floral emblem), what would your chosen sound be?

Back to that theme in a moment. But first, and relatedly, the reflection that if the vile, pestilential year of 2021 that has just finished had any virtues it may be that its terrors alerted some of us to the preciousness and fragility of the small blessings of life.

This idea, 2021's deepening of our appreciation of small, everyday blessings, pops up a lot in the just-published online Seventy-one reflections on 2021.

Writer and musician Sasha Frere-Jones invited 71 sensitive and lively writers to spontaneously write down what they were feeling and remembering in the end-of-year moment. Their short and sharp and often impassioned and bewildered responses are highly readable and chime with lots of feelings familiar to all thinking folk bruised by 2021.

Here's the kind of thing. For Seventy-one reflections Abigail Susik remembers of 2021: "My nerves on edge, totally rapt, sensing the endless desire for beauty and the potential for community and collaboration, the day to day pleasures of living ... combined in the same dose with all the insectoid tendencies of humans, the drive to endlessly colonise, exhaust resources, and infest and inhabit all hosts and rivals ... hope and fear in equal measure."

If you read the 71 for yourself you'll find lots of expressions of hope and fear in equal measure, for 2021 was a year of conflicting emotions. But notions of gratitude pop up a lot and one does sense somehow that 2021's horrors did do some tenderising and sensitising, some deepening of our gratitudes for what we have. So my column today is built from gratitude's shy little bricks.

So, back to the matter of Canberra's aural emblem. Choosing it, will you plump for a man-made, metropolitan sound? What of the roar of a pumped-up Raiders' crowd, the revvings and bellowings of the mighty motors of Summernats, perhaps the high-pitched whining noises of Canberra's world-class NIMBYs resisting imagined threats to the property values of their superior neighbourhoods? Or, what of the angry, nation-embarrassing blatherskite cacophony of question time in the House of Representatives?

Or, given that this is a bush capital, why not one of the sounds of nature? It is not only that we are especially blessed with a gazillion of them here in this place of bush and greenery but also that, this being so still and cemetery-like a city, there is an abundance of background quiet in which nature's shyer sounds are able to assert themselves. This is a city in which, if you pay attention, you can hear what a babbling brook is babbling about, can hear a butterfly sneeze, hear a platypus heave a sigh.

Here I pause and half-digress for a moment to mention some new ideas about sound and listening just discussed in a Wall Street Journal review of a new book.

Reviewer Brandy Schillace invites "Close your eyes. Listen to what surrounds you ... for 'Sound is all around us - inescapable and invisible,' writes Nina Kraus in Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World."

"According to Ms. Kraus, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University and the founder of its Brainvolts auditory neuroscience laboratory, most people would choose sight over hearing - they would rather live in silence than in darkness. But, she reminds us, it is sound that provides us with our greatest means of communication ... and the part of our brain that is given over to sound - what Ms. Kraus calls the 'hearing brain' or 'sound mind' is far bigger and more complex than any of our other sensory equipment. Hearing ... makes us who we are."

"The way by which we convert sound waves into electrical brain signals is indeed unusual: Within the inner ear are tiny hairs in a fluid; when external vibrations enter the ear canal, they agitate the fluid and cause the hair cells to bob up and down ... chemicals rush into the cells, creating electrical signals that the auditory nerve carry to the brain. Ms. Kraus's descriptions of the process are rich in metaphorical imagery, giving us the sense that an ear is a cathedral with walls, roof and floor ..."

And so, having established that Canberrans' ears are cathedrals ... I return to our choice of a distinctive Canberra sound to be performed in those cathedrals.

And so on my provisional shortlist of aural emblems I have just put the bewitching sound, sounding now in my bushy and kookaburra-blessed neighbourhood, of infant kookaburras learning how to laugh.

The sounds they make are indescribable, really. There are suppressed chortles, shy cackle-splutters, stuttered chuckles. The pure and unusual joy given by listening to them comes from knowing what it is these chunky, characterful babies are learning to do, the full-throated maniacal adult trumpeting-yodelling-cackling (arguably Australia's national aural emblem) they will one day perfect and set the bushland ringing with.

Those of us who have lived in kookaburra-blessed bush suburbia for yonks but who (for shame!) have never noticed this wondrous kindergarten-kookaburraness until now must ask ourselves if perhaps these terrible times have tenderised us and sensitised us, at last, to small, everyday Canberra wonders like these for which we should be truly thankful.

"I believe in God," architect Frank Lloyd Wright famously remarked, "it's just that I spell its name N-a-t-u-r-e."

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