On Monday nine spectacular cows, forsaking orthodox pastures for the day, grazed on the lush carpet of the Apollo Room of the Hellenic Club.
As part of its mission to get metropolitan, bush-estranged Australian children to understand where their dairy products come from, Dairy Australia organises the Picasso Cows project. Eighty-three Australian primary schools took part in this year's program, with each school having delivered unto it, some months ago, a life-size fibreglass cow.
Monday's occasion at the Hellenic Club saw the nine Canberra and region school cows all herded (and we use that word advisedly) into the Hellenic Club.  
The eight Canberra schools and one Braidwood school have each spent some busy months embracing their bovine schoolmate, making her the object of their attentions and the focus of their fun-filled educations about the cheesy, yoghurty dairy world.
Monday's nine cows formed a rainbow-coloured cohort, grazing taciturnly (the way cows do), in the Apollo Room. Meanwhile in the same room, with the cows looking on, teachers and students of the nine schools took part in riotous (but educational) games and competitions, supervised by the exuberant Deanne Kennedy, Dairy Australia's project co-ordinator.
The cows, each very individualistic in colour and designs, have to be seen to be believed.
"Theodora" (every school has given its bovine schoolmate a pet name) from Theodore Primary School is so elaborate that she seems like a kind of four-legged gallery in her own right. She boasts not only brilliantly decorated flanks but also complex anklets/bracelets made from different items. So for example one hoof's bracelet is made of the silvery faces of women's wristwatches while another is made of toy cars. Back to the bedazzling Theodora in a moment.
Fibreglass cows, methought, as I mingled with the eerily lifelike herd, have a greater credibility, a greater lifelikeness than any other fibreglass animal possibly can have. A fibreglass leopard, for example, would be ridiculous and a kind of visual oxymoron, because leopards are dashing, athletic things. There is no such thing as a still leopard.
But still cows, like Monday's herd, have a plausibility about them because, of course, even out in a paddock they are so slow moving. From a distance live cows seem becalmed, even still, and just might be fibreglass models rather than the real thing.
And so it seemed to me that the members of Monday's herd were alive, giving the occasional slight twitch of a brightly painted ear here, a twitch of a wet nostril there. The bright, staring, black and white eyes of one of the cows, Palmerston Primary School's highly-patterned beast, seemed to follow one wherever one went in the Apollo Room. There was alarm in those eyes and one could imagine her, though still for the moment as she nibbled the venue's verdant carpet, breaking into a stampede, running amok in the Hellenic Club and terrifying the diners and pokie players.
With each school, usually some way was found to make just about every child in the school a participant in its decoration. So for example, we'd thought the hindquarters of Yarralumla Primary School's cow dappled with bright confetti when in fact,  Dairy Australia's MC Deanne Kennedy informed us, "it's  got 350 thumbprints all over its bottom", the input of 350 youthful thumbs.
Kennedy begged us not to touch that thumbprinted wondercow lest we damage it but it was another quality of the aforementioned Theodora that, running my hands over her (alas, I was unable to keep my hands off any of the nine) she felt as strong, finished and polished as marble. And it emerged, in discussing their masterpiece with Theodore Primary School teacher Jenny Murch and student Montanna??? Singh-Reid, that Theodora has needed to be sturdy for she is to have an outdoor life, grazing in the school's sensory garden.
Theodora has been decorated to look like cow-sized jigsaw puzzle, but each piece of the puzzle is decorated with its own items.
"Each piece of the puzzle was created by a different class," Jenny Murch explained.
"And we have puzzles within the puzzles," Montanna chimed in, "so in each piece we have, say, jigsaw pieces, stickers, we have cards, we have dominoes, we have Scrabble letters ???"
Jenny Murch says the preschool was involved as well so that every student at the school put something into one of the many, many puzzle pieces.
Yes, Theodora does have a finished, sculpted feel about her, and that's in part because Jenny Murch had eight students painting her ("And one of those students was me!" Montanna rejoiced) and then saw to it that on top of that Theodora was lacquered.
She, Theodora, will go on to have a literally glittering career (for some of her jigsaw pieces, including one decorated with the beady eyes used in the making of soft toys, truly glitter and gleam) in the sensory garden.
Had Picasso been asked to pick a favourite among the nine he might have plumped for one named after him. Picowso the Gilmore Girl, made by Gilmore Primary, has her broad flanks decorated by a rural landscape, a farmscape really, in which there grazes a great big herd of black and white cows. Surrealist painters, Marcel Duchamp say or Salvador Dali, would appreciate the surrealism of this, cows painted on the flanks of a real cow.
Dairy Australia says the program "aims to help primary school children understand milk doesn't just come from the supermarket and brown cows don't make chocolate milk". Since the program began in 2008 there have been 700 participating, cow-embellishing schools.