As I write, our often hard-hearted nation is showing some tender-heartedness towards the Iranian soccer players who want to stay in Australia.

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Our prime minister, who has been displaying a heart of concrete towards the forlorn Australian "Isis brides" and their children, seems somehow, inconsistently, to be displaying some warm-hearted human decency in this matter.

"Australians have been moved by the plight of these brave women. They're safe here and they should feel at home here," he has gushed, artfully.

It is a blessing to come to Australia and to feel safe and welcome here and it is a special blessing when one has fled to this lucky, favoured country from somewhere God-forsaken.

If only, then, our national warm-heartedness in these things wasn't so selective. Australia's treatment of some other sorts of foreigners who hanker to come here (for example "boat people" foreigners lacking the obvious immediate appeal of elite, young, female athletes) is an enduring source of national shame.

"Australia has one of the harshest immigration detention regimes in the world," the Australian Human Rights Commission believes, detailing that harshness (which includes prolonged and sometimes offshore detention in God-forsaken places) online at About Immigration and detention in Australia.

There is a special irony in our being a "stop the boats" people with our cold, xenophobic "stop the boats" side cunningly exploited and pandered to by fear-mongering, xenophobia-mongering federal governments and oppositions.

Earlier this month on an edition of ABC Radio National's ever-stimulating Late Night Live (LNL), the dashingly cluey archaeologist Peter Veth scotched the old idea that the first people to arrive on this continent (certainly arriving at least 65,000 years ago and probably far, far longer ago than that) had come down to Australia from SE Asia on foot across then-existing land bridges.

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Research now shows that to reach this continent, those first people had to cross "sea gaps", Veth explained.

"Whatever sea levels were doing for many millions of years, it was impossible to walk [to Australia]. The bottom line is that people who settled Australia did it by making at least five, possibly more, water crossings up to 100 kilometres in length and impossible to see land in the distance. They were boat people."

"Boat people! From the start!" LNL's host David Marr enthused.

Politicians and voters with real, warm flesh-and-blood hearts (and with thinking minds) ought to prick up their ears at Peter Veth's testimony and vow to never again use the label "boat people" as an expression of contempt.

Winnie-the-Pooh and The Canberra Times

This year brings the centenary of two momentous achievements of the English-speaking peoples.

One of them is the first publication of A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh, the book of short stories for children starring the eponymous "bear of very little brain" but of enormous lovability. The other is the first publication of The Canberra Times.

More of Pooh, my childhood hero and lifelong role model, on another occasion. But concentrating on The Canberra Times (to which I gave the best years of my life) for the moment, I have had a brilliant idea about its commemoration.

A few days ago, visiting Sydney and walking my old haunts of the labyrinthine streets and alleyways of old Darlinghust, I came upon a figurative, larger-than-life statue of a short-skirted woman. The statue, Joy, honours the streetwalking, doorway-waiting sex workers who for decades plied their difficult and unhappy trade here in this part of Sydney. It was a misty, drizzly morning, and from a distance and through the mist Joy seemed at first, from her pose, leaning in a stylised doorway, to be unenthusiastically advertising herself to unattractive, contemptibly male me.

Far too many statues, and far, far too many Canberra statues remember famous, often undeserving nabobs of public life. Statues that honour unsung "common" working-class folk are rare but strangely poignant.

The Icelanders are brilliant at these and Reykjavik has a profound Looking Seawards statue honouring fishermen and acknowledging the terrible perils of their work out on the deep.

The Darlinghurst statue is hauntingly humane and I am haunted by it. Perhaps the noble idea that prostitutes should be honoured has special resonance for those of us who, like prostitutes and journalists and car salesmen, work in the least-respected professions. I was a journalist for almost all my working life.

What I'm getting at is that for its centenary The Canberra Times could commission a quality figurative statue of an unnamed journalist, a reporter. It could be installed on the pavement at Mort Street in Canberra's CBD just in front of where The Canberra Times newsroom front door was in the newspaper's 20th-century heyday.

I see a much-larger-than-life bronze reporter with facial features visibly ravaged by a journalist's famously hedonistic lifestyle.

I see him or her dressed in the clothes of the times, with a notebook poking out of one pocket and packet of Marlboro cigarettes poking out of another, and carrying one of the enormous suitcase-sized tape recorders we used in those olden days.

I see the figure depicted as if dashing out to cover a breaking imbroglio, his or her nostrils flaring at the intoxicating scent of news, his or her ears pricking up at the thrilling wail of ambulance sirens.

Will the centenary-minded Canberra Times rise to this inspired vision offered it by someone who gave the paper the best years of his life? To find out ... watch this space.

Ian Warden is a regular contributor.

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