At courtside on the Friday afternoon of last week's excellent world-class Canberra International tennis tournament at Lyneham one thrilled to the shrill war cries of the two dashing women (one of them the splendidly-named Harriet Dart) in quarter-final combat.
Then one became aware of some similarly thrilling but very different and muffled-by-distance background sounds coming to us from somewhere beyond our venue.
The combination of these two sorts of sounds, provided a unique-to-Canberra aural experience and was exciting in the extreme.
Readers, see if you can guess the famous/infamous source of these "background sounds" as I describe them thus:
Imagine yourself on the edge (never daring to enter it) of a deep, dark, make-believe jungle full of unseen deep-throatedly roaring, raging, man-eating monster-beasts.
Not just your regular lions and tigers but savage Jurassic creatures: Godzillas, banshees, Hounds of the Baskervilles, dragons, hippogriffs, all the werewolves of nightmarish myth and legend. Imagine, too, that already cacophonous jungle somehow generating its own weather of electric storms of booming thunders.
Yes! Well done sounds-appreciative readers! Of course the sounds I am describing were coming thundering and bellowing across the paddocks to Lyneham from the not-so-far-away Summernats' festival at EPIC.
Some Summernats' event was underway requiring many modified cars to sing and shout with their own highly individual 800-horsepower supercharged voices.
Shame on those of you who make your "noise complaints" about Summernats, never feeling a grateful sounds appreciation of the characterful musick the fleeting event always plays us.
How fabulous the Summernats' sounds, heard from Lyneham's courtside! Mighty sounds heard from a distance (ships' foghorns far out at sea, bagpipes across the glen, the Canberra Carillon across the lake, an MCG grand final crowd heard from an MCG car park) take on magic qualities.
It delighted me and filled me with a strange species of civic pride to think that this Friday afternoon musical combination of the warrior-princess shrieks of the tennis players at this Canberra tournament and the pulse-quickening sounds from the Summernats' jungle (where the Wild Things were) was unique to Canberra.
The person who is tired of Canberra, and of Summernats, is tired of Life.
MORE WARDEN:
Readers, what do the Devil, witches and their spells, Yoko Ono, Eve (consort of Adam), Rasputin, the Kelly Gang and Canberra's light rail expansion all have in common?
Give up? It is that they are all famous and effective scapegoats.
Throughout history unsophisticated, superstitious peoples have needed scapegoat-bogeymen to blame for everything that goes wrong in Life. In that great credulous tradition Canberrans' best scapegoat is light rail and its real and imagined costs.
Wherever Canberra's disgruntled are enabled to let off their steam, one finds them imagining that everything they think wrong with their Canberra lives, everything from their unsatisfactory sex lives to their suburb's unmown grass and pocked pavements, to algal blooms, to long waits in emergency, to the car-denting size of this government's Labor-Greens ACT hailstones is light rail's fault.
Whenever I trespass into the Fogeystan of the Letters page of The Canberra Times there is someone there blaming light rail for something that can't possibly be light rail's costs' fault.
One recent beauty of an epistle blamed light rail and the tram-favouring government for the odours that the contents of red wheelie bins give off in hot weather. The logic, if I understood it, was that the money spent on light rail means the government can't afford to empty red bins the several times a week they should be emptied.
So if light rail and its costs are somehow supernaturally to blame whenever money is not flung at things dear to Canberran hearts, you can see how it belongs in the distinguished scapegoat company of this piece's opening sentence.
The Devil's evil-doings are legendary. Beelzebub is behind every temptation that ever tempts mankind off the straight and narrow and into Sin.
Yoko Ono is always blamed for the break-up of the Beatles.
Eve (sexistly framed by her consort and by God and punished for showing an intellectual curiosity for which she should really have been given great credit) is blamed for every moral flaw women ever show.
Rasputin, suspected of having satanic powers, was blamed for every disaster that befell the Russian Empire while he had the ears of Russia's movers and shakers.
The Kelly Gang in its heyday was blamed for everything that ever went wrong in South-eastern Australia. This is historically true and is a phenomenon sweetly captured in the satirical song Blame It On The Kellys.
In that ditty there's no crime too big or too small for spooked Victorians to blame on the Kellys. They even get the blame for failed potato crops and for the otherwise inexplicable death of a man at the suspiciously early age of 109.
The Canberra Liberals are already blaming the costs of light rail for the allegedly "neglected" state of our suburbs and will go to the next election making political uses of this figurative Rasputin, this figurative Kelly Gang.
It is wicked of the spin-doctor Rasputins of the Canberra Liberals to sink so low as this in their hunt for the votes of simple-minded Canberrans. But perhaps the Devil had made the Canberra Liberals do it.
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
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