Canberra can be a confusing place, and Senate rules mean photographers wishing to take pictures of divisions in the upper house must think again – as only the person with the call (the permission to speak at that point) can be photographed.
Step in Mike Bowers’ clearly-quite-extensive collection of a popular brand of building block to fill in the reporting gaps on happenings in the upper house via the #BrickSenate series.
For your added enjoyment, we’ve included some real beauties posted by Guardian Australia readers on Twitter. Who’s your favourite character? Punk Penny Wong? Cowboy Heffernan? Eric Abetz as an actual real robot? Let us know in the comments below.
“Once we launched the project the floodgates really opened,” Bowers says. “Fans from all over the building outed themselves, offering up all sorts of goodies.”
A version of the Greens senator Scott Ludlam was also born, but dropped down a lift shaft like so many missing Western Australian votes.
“Some of the characters were easily cast,” Bowers says. “The mohawk said #warriorWong loudly to me.”
Mix and matching means Bowers is able to get just the look he’s after, with a little work. “To get big enough hair to do justice to the independent senator from South Australia I had to modify a black turban – and #BrickXenophon was born,” he says.
And now for what mid-noughties newsroom types called “user-generated content”:
To finish with, we enjoyed this incarnation of Glenn Lazarus reacting to the constant text messages from the education minister, Christopher Pyne. Now you’re just being mean …
Bowers would like to thank journalists up and down the gallery who’ve raided their kids’ toyboxes for new characters.
Special thanks go to Lyndal Curtis, Michelle Ainsworth, plus Guardian Australia’s political editor, Lenore Taylor, and her daughter, Claudia. Mike’s own kids also contributed, apparently failing to bat an eyelid when their beloved toys were whisked off to find internet fame.
