Chinute Chinute – Big Owl

This entry states that and stops. What the ancestor means, and how the story should be told, belongs to Larrakia people; the council's own description is the appropriate limit for a catalogue.

What can be said is that the work belongs to a much larger body of Larrakia public art through Darwin, and that the city's commissioning practice has been unusually consistent about who makes it. The same ABC survey that documents this sculpture also records Denise Quall's mural on the ABC building and her work at Darwin International Airport, Kenny Reid's carvings that became the four aluminium jabirus welcoming motorists to Palmerston, and Aly de Groot's Interconnected dugongs at Dripstone Cliffs made in collaboration with Bilawara Lee – the same partnership that produced the woven bronze jellyfish at East Point.

The frogmouth is a good subject. It is not an owl despite everyone calling it one, it is nocturnal, it sits motionless pretending to be a broken branch, and almost nobody sees one despite them being common. Casting one in bronze at the entrance to a busy walkway is putting a familiar invisibility in front of people.

One of the Palmerston jabirus disappeared in 2016 and was recovered after an anonymous tip led police to a pool at Humpty Doo.