COOP

Hugh Duke-Freney & Marilena Hewitt

A reflection of the idle time during the 2020 covid-19 mandated Lockdown. We spent our time making a chicken coop under our share house in sunny Meanjin.

Explore the shared process, individual reflections and idiosyncratic moments by clicking the images on your screen.

We acknowledge and pay our respects to the Jagera, Turrbal and Bundjalung elders, past, present and emerging, the traditional custodians of the lands in our story.

Chickens have been a constant in my life. I grew up on a commercial chicken farm and my Dad still sets up chicken farms today. A big painting of three chickens has travelled with me from life on the farm, to life at the coast and now to life in the city, always watching over me.

I love chickens but I also really, really hate chickens.

It is difficult to separate the concept of “chickens” from the uncomfortable relationship with my Dad.

Truthfully, I know very little about them. I feel uneasy about that. It’s a reassuring feeling to be in tune with the things around you. Growing up I felt in tune with the creek at the bottom of the hill, with the golf ball weeds (balloon cotton bush) where I would run amok, with the taste of the dust rising from dirt roads—just not with the chickens.

Now we have entered lockdown and we have adopted four little chicks.

I don’t think it took long for Muffy to realise that I am far from a chicken expert, and they were cool with that. Huzzah, we could just learn together. I could have asked Dad for advice but I was more interested in trying things my own way before calling out for help.

I was discovering parallels between Dad establishing the farm at Corndale and me making the coop for our backyard. Completely different scales, motives and resources but fundamentally the same. Housing for chickens.

Dad is clever and he is good with his hands, but he is quiet and reserved. Much of his knowledge I am not in tune with but I wish I could be. I know my relationship with my father is not a unique one—thousands of references to ‘Daddy issues’ in pop culture reassure me. The conflict between yearning for meaning and knowledge set against absence is a complicated and layered conundrum to unpack.

Dad is a really good craftsman, therefore as his son, I should be too.

Fuck that, I should be a really good craftsman because I want to be one. No other reason needed.

I really like using my hands, and, for the first time, working on the coop, I feel like I’m okay at it. Free from the weight of comparison.

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Hugh is a furniture maker studying a bachelor of design (Architecture) at QUT. Hugh is interested in better understanding the materials he works with and methods of manufacturing.

Marilena is a queer architecture graduate (QUT), emerging publisher, designer, poet, writer and filmmaker living and working on unceded Meanjin land.