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Collected Item: “Family Fights”

Give your story a title.

Family Fights

What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?

Facebook screenshots

Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.

HIST30060
My family is pretty large: I have two brothers, a sister….and a whole menagerie of animals! Gracie dog is the best, but we also have another dog, several cats, a rabbit, and a variety of feathered friends. My siblings live interstate, so we’ve been barred from seeing them since February because of border restrictions. During lockdown, we’ve been keeping in touch by having consistent arguments on our family group chat about how to rank our pets from best to worst. My brother frames it like a ‘best and fairest medal’, as you’d receive in sport. The conversations remind me of when we all used to live together at home, and they’ve provided a nice reprieve from more ominous discussions about the pandemonium enveloping society. I think the notion of ‘reprieve’ is central to the power of animals in this plague year: they distract us from our pandemic woes and force us to take a sabbatical from our anxieties.

Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?

#family, #fights, #pets, #menagerie, #birds, #ducks, #cats, #dogs, #rabbit, #facebook, #communication, #happy, #nostalgic

Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)

Joseph Moorhead

Give this story a date.

2020-09-26
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