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Canberra Today 15°/16° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Canberra Confidential: There’s a bear in there…

PYROGRAPHY, the curious and ancient art of tattooing wood with a small, hot-tipped pen, is quite the thing with the ACT Woodcraft Guild.

Pyrographic champion Shannon Henry and her burned image of a bear.
Pyrographic champion Shannon Henry and her burned image of a bear.

At its recent annual exhibition, Queanbeyan art teacher Shannon Henry was named the year’s club grand champion for her pyrographed bear on a piece of Blackwood Burl.

A pyrographer for only three years, Shannon took several months of delicate burning to create the bear, which she says “flowed from the figured pattern in the wood burl and an image of a bear I had seen”.

The Woodcraft Guild maintains a three-day workshop in the Lions Youth Haven, Kambah, and offers members opportunities to show and sell their woodcraft items. The next sales day is at the Governor-General’s Family Day, at Government House, on September 21.

Book award springs to life

CC’s hearing whispers of worry around the literature traps that the ACT Government, in the Centenary year of all times, is leaving it too late to present the 2013 ACT Book of the Year and two fellowships.

It’s a question of timing, says CC’s literature mole. It seems almost too late for these programs to open for applications, considering literary awards take the best part of six months to open, assess, and announce.

Not (entirely) so! When prodded by CC, the minister’s man says the BoY will run as usual and, as if by magic, ArtsACT will have it underway within the next fortnight with the prize held at $10k and the presentation in December.

But the tasty two $45,000 fellowships have been chopped due, he says, to declining or unsuitable applications. A nice saving nevertheless.

Cold comfort

AS spring sprung out in Forde last week, our local deep throat got his ActewAGL power bill and stuffed in the envelope was the familiar presence of  its “Essentials” newsletter, the winter edition.

“It’s full of great information such as the ‘Winter home safety check’ and ‘Tips to reduce your bills’… There’s a write-up on ‘Canberra’s Big Day’ that they sponsored back in early March, and invitations to enter a number of competitions,” he reports.

“Well, I guess I won’t be winning a ‘Visit to the Canberra Glassworks’ or an ‘Enviro Escape’, but maybe I can still enter the annual “Postcards from Your Town” photography competition. Nope. That one closed three days ago. Sigh…”

 

Sign of disdain #2

A WEEK after walking out of a kebab shop because the cheap lunch advertised outside was not actually available, CC was enticed inside the relatively new Treehouse Bar at 32 Northbourne Avenue by the “$9 lunches” listed on the chalkboard outside.Sign

But not for long. The chalked-up meals weren’t actually available, the busy gentleman behind the bar explained, leaving his smartphone sitting there displaying a slightly less-appetising new menu as he rushed off. Another one for Fair Trading…

Double Double Shot

THEY come, they go but is there to be a second coming for Deakin’s former Double Shot cafe? Its successor the Deakin Espresso Bar and Café, at the Deakin shops, has closed after barely a year, but there are window signs saying DS will be back “refreshed and ready with our new team”.

In August last year, “CityNews” dining writer Wendy Johnson opined that former Prime Minister Alfred Deakin would be proud to sit at “a venue bearing his name, relaxing at a small place that concentrates on offering good food at decent prices”. But it wasn’t to be and the double Double Shot will be back next month.

 

Family ties that bind

IS this a first for local Rotary, the rather unglamorously titled District 9710, wonders the Gungahlin club? New inductee Geoff Windsor is the son of club member Liz Friend. A mother and son first, maybe, but the Canberra South club’s then president Mike Zarew inducted his daughter Natalie Johnson as a Rotarian a couple of years ago.

 

Action, eventually

ACTION buses in the digital age: “Last night I put money on my MyWay card online, so it would be ready to use in the morning,” writes “Troubled” of Turner. “I foolishly believed it to be instant, but it takes five days to work! Is that not completely pointless in the digital age?”

 

Exit to enter? press

DIRECTION, one might think, would be a key competency at the Post Office. Not so, it seems, at the GPO on Alinga Street. Entry from the street to the post-office boxes has a big green button that says: “Press to exit”.

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Ian Meikle, editor

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