On the first morning of the 2020 Summit the dogs seemed unconcerned about what big ideas might come from the 1000 best and brightest gathered in Canberra to plot our future.

The tide was out and the sandbanks exposed. It was a cool, overcast morning and the water was a deep grey-green. On the pier, four elderly men were fishing, hopeful but resigned, based on experience, to having their hopes dashed.

The dogs, perhaps a dozen of them, were of various shapes and sizes and ages. The people also varied in shape and size and age. They divided their attention between watching out for their dogs, and sharing a few minutes of amiable chit-chat.

On the second morning of the summit the dogs, unaware that some very big ideas had been floated in Canberra, were a little more boisterous in their socialising, perhaps because the morning was so damn gorgeous. Their human companions, too, touched by the day - or was it the big ideas coming out of the summit? - were in life-affirming mood, smiley and unashamedly friendly.

It will no doubt strike some readers as a contrivance, this conflating of dogs, the beach, the joy of autumn mornings and the 2020 Summit. Just as it would be a contrivance to describe the mood of the beach dogs and their human companions on Tuesday morning, federal budget day. When its history is written, the state of the sandbanks on the local beach, the movement of the tides, the pattern of the clouds, the feel of the sky and the interaction between dogs and humans on this day will not be recorded.

And yet.

A couple of weeks before the summit an old man called into a talkback radio program and said that his wife had recently died. She had asked him, when she was gone, to look after their cat and their dog. He said he could not afford to do so, not on a single pension. He was going to have them put down.

It can be assumed that as a result of the flood of offers of financial and other support, the old man was able to keep the animals alive. This was talkback radio at its best - or its most cynical, depending on how you look at it.

But the old man and the saving of his animals had a dark side. And it was the dark side that lingered and darkened the mood even as the dogs went about their life-affirming dance, racing across the sandbanks on those autumn summit mornings.

It was this question that plagued those mornings: how was it that the old man was so alone that only the kindness of strangers could ensure that he fulfilled his wife's last wishes?