Queen Elizabeth II island could have honoured many others: Dorothy Parker, Jane Austen, Beethoven

I owe this therapeutic quip (it is a great one to carry everywhere with you as a kind of anti-anxiety/anti-nausea pill to pop when required) to the 'Quip Queen', Dorothy Parker (1893-1967).

The often spitefully witty New Yorker, a poet, essayist, critic and satirist with an eye and an ear for human foibles, died 50 years ago this week and so is being much remembered and celebrated.

Better and better-read Australian governments would have done better to mark Parker's significant anniversary by renaming Canberra's Aspen Island after her instead of making that islet the zillionth place in the Commonwealth named after Queen Elizabeth II.

Generations to come would have asked "Who was Dorothy Parker?" and signage at the island and the inquirers' parents and teachers would have enlightened them, thus enriching their lives.

Calling the island Germaine Greer Island (and perhaps the bridge out to it Female Eunuch Bridge) would celebrate a toweringly important Australian.

Another of my long-standing suggestions, that if the island must be named after a famous Englishwoman it could become Jane Austen Island, was ignored by then prime minister Scott Morrison who one feels sure has never read a novel, let alone a novel by a woman.

Canberra's Jane Austen Island (perhaps I will hasten to rename it when I come to power) could become a prime setting in an annual Austen Festival.

Her novels remain fabulously popular, boosted by great film and TV costume drama adaptations of them, somehow always starring Keira Knightley. Austen fans, women wearing period bonnets and men in knee-high riding boots and cut-away coats, would flock to such a festival.

There would be re-enactments on the island and along its elegant and romantic little bridge (renamed Pride and Prejudice Bridge) of swoon-making love scenes from the novels, with transfixed theatregoers seated on the nearby shore.

In the same spirit, the spirit of not fawningly naming the island after a redundant-to-Australia foreign monarch but of naming it instead after an international giant of the arts, the island might become Beethoven Island.

Beethoven Island's carillon could clang out great Beethovian moments like the hair-raising "da da da DAH" opening of his Fifth symphony or the Ode To Joy melody from his Ninth. This music from Beethoven Island would be heard right across the inner city for sound waves travel faster and clearer and louder across watery expanses like Lake Burley Griffin.

But back to Dorothy Parker. The online Literary Hub is pointing to a selection of her quips and nominates "Their pooled emotions ... " as just the thing for anyone in a corner and alone and ignored at a party.

My own uses of it have been miscellaneous. It used to come in handy in university tutorials when I was trying (almost always in vain) to teach something to unteachable undergraduates.

Then as recently as just a few weeks ago a variety of the quip occurred to me while watching some of last few parliamentary question times of the Morrison tyranny and lamenting the behaviour of everyone in the House of Representatives. Watching those cheap pageants, those unseemly melees, it seemed to me that the MHRs' pooled dignified remarks wouldn't fill a toy poodle's drinking bowl.

Dorothy Parker was often very unhappy in love and was very frank about those tragedies in her verse. All of us who have ever suffered from love (the pandemic for which there is no vaccine) can identify with her woebegone lament: "The sun's gone dim,/and the moon's gone black./For I loved him,/ and he didn't love back."

READ MORE WARDEN:

There's a world of wisdom in that exquisite miniature. At times of unrequited love our self-centred misery feels so cosmologically enormous that surely even the sun and moon, and the Milky Way too, must be transformed by it.

Dorothy Parker was a wonderfully astute observer of her city of New York, New York (so good they named it twice). Literary Hub's 50th anniversary selection of Parkerisms includes the following, calling it the case For not leaving New York:

"London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it. There is excitement ever running its streets.

Each day, as you go out, you feel the little nervous quiver that is yours when you sit in the theatre just before the curtain rises. Other places may give you a sweet and soothing sense of level; but in New York there is always the feeling of 'Something's going to happen.' It isn't peace. But, you know, you do get used to peace, and so quickly. And you never get used to New York."

Readers, where do you situate Canberra in Parker's catalogue of city types? Canberra can scarcely claim to be a thrilling city with always a feeling of "something's going to happen". If anything there is always a feeling here that nothing's going to happen.

In which case does this mean that Canberra is somehow "satisfied" like Paris, or even self-satisfied in its own unique way? Or if Canberra is like Paris "resigned" what is it the federal capital city is resigned to?