Big Owl – Sale

A named maker is the valuable part. Men's sheds produce an enormous amount of public work across Australia – benches, playgrounds, restorations, sculpture – and it is almost never credited to anybody. The catalogue holds one other properly attributed example, the marri-timber peg at Bridgetown made by the group called the Grumpy Old Men. Two credited shed pieces out of hundreds of objects is a fair measure of how invisible that labour usually is.

Guardian is the word the project used, and the owl is a good choice for it. Owls are the birds people already read as watchful, they are genuinely present in the Gippsland farmland and river red gums around Sale, and a community garden is a place that benefits from something standing over it.

Recycled timber matters too. Not fibreglass, not moulded plastic – reclaimed wood, which will weather and eventually need care, and which ties the object to the shed's ordinary work of repairing and reusing things.

Sale sits in central Gippsland at the edge of the Lakes, and its community gardens are a working plot rather than a tourist site.

Neither the sources nor the catalogue give its age.