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Collected Item: “Bunnings Sausage on Cup Day”

Give your story a title.

Bunnings Sausage on Cup Day

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

Photograph of sausage in white bread

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.

Melbourne Cup Day, 2021. My family has always made time for good food and good drink during the races. Today, though, started with a barbecued sausage in white bread from Bunnings. The return of the community fundraiser sausage sizzle at Bunnings hardware stores has been the subject of memes and jokes throughout yet another long winter lockdown: it is, so the joke goes, the best symbol of freedom we have. The sausage sizzle has a peculiar cultural import in Australia. In recent years, the election day tradition of fundraising has been called the “democracy sausage”, a signifier of the national democratic culture. The “freedom sausage” seems to be in the same category. After months at home, it is the simple things like browsing pot plants and lumber that are most appealing. Only select Bunnings, apparently, were approved to resume sizzles this weekend, so I was glad to take advantage of it. Submitted for University of Melbourne HIST30060, Semester 2 2021.

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?

bunnings,sausage,freedom,restrictions,meme,culture

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

Patrick Gigacz

Give this story a date.

2021-11-02
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