Thrills, tattoos and threads top off a day at the Canberra Show - The Canberra Times

Cody West 6 and Chloe West 4 from Chiefly show of their prizes from the Royal Canberra Show at EPIC. Photo: Jeffrey Chan

• Your guide to this year's Canberra Show

Some whinge that we are a ''nanny state'' these days, but surely we can be no such thing as long as the state allows fairground folk to erect and ordinary citizens to freely climb aboard death-defying-looking rides such as the Freak Out and the XXXL.

Those are two of the scariest rides in the sideshow alley of the Royal Canberra Show. and on Friday afternoon daring citizens, their nannies nowhere to be seen, were bravely riding them.

Canberra Spinners and Weavers Guild member Jacqueline Ingarfield during a demonstration at the Royal Canberra Show. Photo: Jeffrey Chan

This reporter, my inner nanny refusing to let me take the chance, could only look on in jealous admiration, then rush to talk to people after their rides, rather in awe of them and their courage, as if they were cosmonauts who had just returned to earth.

''The Freak Out is definitely a good name for it,'' Lyneham High School student Lea trilled, moments after getting off the ride she'd shared with her friend and schoolfriend Meg.

Neither had gone green, in fact both were excited but composed young women - and great cosmonaut material if ever Australia has a space program.

''You're basically thrown up into the air and lifted off your seat,'' Lea marvelled, looking back on the flying, twirling experience.

Nearby, Kyle Mullins was having a ride/flight on the fiendish XXXL, a kind of pendulum that among other tortures lifts its riders high up into the sky and holds them there briefly, framing Kyle and his pod against the flawless blue sky.

''It was bloody awesome! It was twirling me around in the air,'' he reported, wide-eyed and laughing, on his return to earth and to his relieved family. Kyle is a substantial young man, and he was shaking with excitement.

Kyle Mullins gets airborne on one of the rides at the Royal Canberra Show at EPIC. Photo: Jeffrey Chan

All was pounding music and flashing lights and cheerful vulgarity in that suburb of the show. The air was full of the deep-fried perfume of Dagwood Dogs, and young women wore T-shirts with statements like ''Skinny Jeans Are For Bitches''.

But the enormous show, like a city, has contrasting neighbourhoods, and in the cool of the Cooyong Pavilion, among all the crafts, there was a different mood. Potters potted, knitters knitted and spinners spun, and all about them were the creations that had been judged.

Ann Troet's rosette-winning rug, an entry in the ''article of creative crochet'' section, was a startling-looking creation that called to you from across the pavilion, but on Friday was made even more eye-arresting by being festooned with rosettes galore. It had knocked the judges' socks off, and they had given it every award there is.

Good artists find inspiration everywhere, and Ms Troet had found inspiration for her rug in one of those old Golden Fleece petrol bowsers (remember them?) with a bright yellow plastic ram on the top that lights up at night. There is a fanaticism about cars and motor bikes in her home, and when some years ago at a swap-meet in Bendigo the family found a Golden Fleece bowser artfully converted into a bar fridge, it was love at first sight. ''It was one of those things you spot and you just have to have,'' she said. ''It's gorgeous.''

It stands in the living room of their home at Evatt (''the yellow ram lights up at night,'' she rejoices) and the rug has been made, with lots of Golden Fleece yellow in it, to share the room with the fridge and match its distinctive yellow features, most of all the canary-yellow ram.

Made mostly of natural fibres and full of complexities of colour and texture, it took her about seven painstaking months to make.

Nearby, this reporter came across one of those things you spot and feel you just have to have, perhaps for the living room. It was Sharon Pech's slightly blush-making mosaic work called Adam's Apples (again, impressing judges and festooned with rosettes) in which the life-sized lower half of a man's naked body is covered with mosaic. At Adam's unmistakably male groin are (can it be that there is a double entendre in the work's name?) his budgie is smuggled beneath a giant mosaic fig leaf. His body finishes at the waist, on top of which is arranged a nice bowl of apples, and a little notice asking us not to touch this ''forbidden fruit''.

Vowing to come back the next day and make an offer for Adam's Apples, I bustled away to the car park, pausing just long enough at the Temporary Tattoos booth. There the woman ahead of me was having her lovely neck improved with a tattoo of a humming bird. This reporter, feeling patriotic, for the Royal Canberra Show deepens your sense of being Australian, had his manly forearm improved with a tattoo of the Southern Cross.