In the current, nightmarish ABC TV series The Killing Season the prime minister's Lodge is a place of dark, Machiavellian, dagger-sharpening nastiness. It is a lonely mansion with a tear in every room.
So here is a literally rose-coloured view of it in gentler, more charming times. Sandra Smith has been tidying up her late mother-in-law's possessions and in the bottom of a drawer stumbled across a sweet little set of imaginatively-tinted 1928 postcards of our city's few (but precious) attractions.
"Things have changed a bit!" she marvels, of this set that includes as well views of the wedding cakey Parliament House and the Hotel Canberra. The tinter has enhanced the latter and nearby Albert Hall with roofs of forget-me-not blue.
In 1928 the occupants of The Lodge were prime minister Stanley Bruce, his wife Ethel and their attractive little black spaniel. No one then was planning to do to amiable and popular PM Bruce what in The Killing Season hatchet-faced ALP assassins are planning to do to troubled Kevin Rudd. And you can see how in this old postcard The Lodge reflects this rosy serenity, and that there is bound to be laughter (and perhaps a vase of roses from the garden) in every room.
We know that the Bruces were very attached to their spaniel because it is there with them in many photographs. We can assume that they were distraught when their companion gave up the ghost.
For those of us who love our companion animals their deaths are shocking and saddening and this valid form of grief now receiving some sympathetic, scholarly attention. Today at the ACT Legislative Assembly, Sydney veterinarian, academic and pet bereavement counsellor Dr David Foote will be speaking at a forum When your loved pet dies: dealing with the death of a pet as one ages.
If any readers are sniggering at these concepts then they are bound to be folk who have never loved an animal and/or have, like today's Ministers for Immigration, a piece of flint where most of us have a heart.
It gives every lover of a loved pet an emotional hammering when the dear creature ebbs away but the special emphasis of this forum, hosted by Pets and Positive Ageing, looks at the important relationships between people and their pets as they age.
As we age, and perhaps after the Grim Reaper has already bereaved us of close humans, animal companions can assume an enormous importance for us. Can we be helped to cope with grief like this?
Dr Foote, speaking to us on Wednesday, insists that, yes, there is advice that can help a lot.
One first principle for him is to get the bereaved to accept that their grief is absolutely valid, understandable and true and that the pain they feel is not something trivial, mad or perverse.
"It is OK to grieve," he tells them.
He says that though the grief felt over a dead pet may not be the same thing as the grief felt over the death of a human loved one, it can be just as crushing. He reports (admitting that it surprised him at first) that over 50 per cent of those he counsels confide to him that they are more distressed by a pet's death than by the death of a parent.
Then, he stresses, every person's grief is different, unique even. He sometimes counsels people suffering from "a horrible cluster of struggles and crises" for whom the loss of a pet feels like a kind of last straw.
He urges the bereaved to look for people or a person who will give sympathetic support (and he regrets that this is not always readily available in workplaces where some may not think pet bereavement a profound thing). He says the bereaved will find lots of information and advice online, and will find too that Australia is now rather well covered by good pet bereavement counsellors that you can talk to on the phone. A lot of his counselling is done by phone.
Pets and Positive Ageing Inc is an organisation that encourages community conversations on the benefits of older people being able to continue living with their pets in all types of accommodation; whether it is in the comfort of their own home, in aged care residential facilities or in independent living. For more information on the bereavement session and Pets and Positive Ageing Inc visit petsandpositiveageing.com/
Of course if grieving pet owners need a fine role model for taking their despair seriously then they need look no further than mad, bad and dangerous to know Lord Byron.
He so loved his Newfoundland dog Boatswain (pronounced bo'sun) that upon the dear dog's death he wrote a grand, grieving poem in praise of his late friend and interred him in a fabulous monument at Byron's stately home, Newstead Abbey. Byron's epitaph for Boatswain, attached to the dog's tomb, says that dogs are sincere and decent while a human is just a "degraded mass of animated dust" and a cheat and hypocrite.
Dog's are often called a man's best friend and in his case Byron affirms it to have been literally true, the epitaph ending:
To mark a friend's remains these stones arise; I never knew but one – and here he lies.
Correction. Blush. One errant, senior-moment sentence in Wednesday's column item about the famous "left-handedness" of cockatoos called them "right-handed". But as reported here 100 times before, cockatoos, overwhelmingly, seem to use their left hand/foot to lift food to their beaks.
