Earlier this week in Parliament House, the recently retired diplomat Dennis Richardson bumped into a young staffer who recalled first moving to Canberra.

"Her mother gave her a coffee machine on the grounds that there wouldn't be any good coffee in Canberra," the former Secretary of the Department of Defence laughed. "This wasn't 40 years ago. This was two, three years ago. For anyone living in Canberra today, that provokes a good belly laugh."