Elizabeth Thurbon remembers sitting in an office at Treasury in 1968, taking shorthand for a very senior official she was executive assistant to.
"I looked up from my notebook and he'd disappeared," she recalled.
"I was gobsmacked. But it turned out he was rolling his own cigarettes while dictating and had lent down to pick up all the tobacco he'd dropped on the floor!"
This was the Commonwealth public service of the late 1960s: a hazy cigarette smoke fog hanging in the air of makeshift fibro offices in Barton.
Where groups of 10 women sat together in typing pools, clad in mini skirts, woollen skivvies and beehives, their handbags tucked neatly in a case under their desks.
It was a time when your fortnightly wage of about $30 cash was delivered to your desk in a yellow envelope and there was no need for an Employee Assistance Program - if you had a problem, you confided in the motherly tea lady, who brought a hot beverage to your desk so you didn't have to stand up and leave the policy documents you were typing up.
And it was also a time when you could nominate a good-looking female colleague to receive the title of "Public Service Bird of the Week". If she won, she'd be professionally photographed for The Canberra Times' sister paper, an afternoon edition called The Canberra News.
Since running an article last week attempting to track down former Public Service Bird of the Week Diana Turner, six former 'birds' have been in contact with The Canberra Times, including Diana herself.
The ANU's Dr Diana Kostyrko (nee Turner), now an international authority on art and cultural theory, can't remember how she was nominated to be a 'bird', but remembers being told to "wear something sexy" for the photo shoot. It's a concept that's unfathomable in 2017.
"I guess it was my colleagues at work who put my name forward," Dr Kostyrko said.
"It was no big deal at the time. I don't think you actually got anything for it.
"It was flattering, but I'm a bit more a feminist now I'd imagine."
Dr Kostyrko remembers Canberra in the 60s and 70s as a place that was "quite discriminatory".
"There was a lot of sexism and racism and creedism, and because it was post-war, there was a lot of migration," she said.
"People who didn't have degrees or tertiary education were working in what was known as the fourth division.
"They weren't allowed to be clerks, they had to either be stenographers or tech officers of clerical assistants - so there was that educational divide, it was a sort of underclass.
"And that barrier didn't change until the 1980s."
Former 1969 Public Service Bird of the Week Elizabeth Thurbon (nee Furlonger) described scoring the title in the late 1960s as "a harmless bit of fun."
"Today, it would be like a 'let's introduce someone from the public service' article," Ms Thurbon said.
"It wasn't in any way socially unacceptable, it was just a nice little thing - getting your photo in the paper was a big deal. You bought a million papers to show mum and dad, and your friends."
But her nonchalance toward her Bird of the Week title flies in the face of pioneering action Ms Thurbon undertook in the early 1970s to improve the career paths of women in the public service.
Frustrated by a lack of more senior positions for women, Ms Thurbon started the Typists Action Group to create better opportunities for young women working for the Commonwealth.
She led a rally at the Labor Club in Civic in 1970 - "we thought 12 people would turn up and lo and behold they were lined up and down the street" - resulting in the more senior position of 'Executive Assistant' being added to an entry-level typist's career options.
Dutch native Jenny Cockburn (nee Meijer), who joined the Australian Customs Service in 1968 and worked there on and off for the following 32 years, said she was chosen as Bird of the Week to show the diversity of a young public service.
"I think I was picked because I looked so different - I'd emigrated from Holland and joined the public service at just 18," Mrs Cockburn said.
"My mother is Sri Lankan so I was dark, I had bangles and chains and I was very different - a bit of a hippie.
"You did get men who commented on your looks back then but they were always respectful.
"It was definitely a different world in the 60s and 70s, but we loved it."