Giant kookaburra built by Australian man during lockdown: 'People adore it'

An Australian man has used his time in lockdown to create a 750kg sculpture of a laughing kookaburra that he says will bring joy to the community in bleak times.

Dr Farvardin Daliri, an academic and artist, debuted the huge bird this week on the streets of Brisbane, and will soon take it north to the Townsville Cultural Festival.

“I started making it during Christmas,” he said. “Then the design was altered and I decided to have it laughing, with movement and stuff. It didn’t get completed. But when the lockdown started I had time to basically make it laugh.”

Daliri, who is from Townsville but had been in Brisbane due to travel restrictions, said the bird had been designed for a festival celebrating multiculturalism and community.

Born in Iran, Daliri studied sculpture in India before migrating to Australia, and has also created a giant carpet snake, which is a tourist attraction in Burdekin.

“It’s a work of love,” he told Guardian Australia. “The festival we are having in Townsville, 25 years old, has ‘unity in diversity’ as its motto.

“Native animals and birds, we relate to all of them in the same way. It is a point of transition – from ‘I’m a migrant’ to ‘I’ve arrived’. These totems make us feel like we’ve arrived.

“This is the common ground – the land and habitat, owned by Indigenous people for thousands of years. That’s what it is. In this land, birds laugh at us.”

The giant bird will now join the ranks of Australia’s other famous “big things” – from the Big Merino to the Big Banana to the Big Watermelon.

But in contrast, Daliri said his kookaburra was surprisingly narrow and light. It is four-and-a-half metres tall, eight-and-a-half metres long, but only two-and-a-half metres wide – and has been registered as a boat trailer.

He told Guardian Australia the finished product was the result of “a lot of little inventions”. The body is made of more than 100 steel circles, interlocked, with a fibreglass beak and a custom sound system to provide the distinctive laugh.

“People don’t realise how narrow it is,” he said. “I can move it and shift it around, I can do that because it balances on the tail, not all the weight is on it.

“It is a steel structure, fully engineered on to a boat trailer, it is melded into the frame basically … But it looks like it’s fluffy and light and wobbly and can fall off at any second. You see the kookaburra narrowly sitting on a log on the trailer, but actually that log is a steel frame. The contact point is very minimal but basically it’s a steel shaft. It balances the weight from the beak to the tail; it’s very balanced.”

Daliri said he had been overwhelmed with messages of support ever since his daughter posted a short clip of the bird, during its first test drive, on to Twitter.

“People just adore it. I’ve had it in my backyard for a couple of months. The funny thing is I didn’t plan anything for media. We just did a few hundred metres of test. We just checked the balance, the laughing mechanism worked.

“A lot of people overlooked from the roadside and saw this huge monster sitting here and wanted to know what it is.”

In previous years, he has made giant koalas and other animals for the Townsville festival, and he said that people should contact him if they wanted their own.

“I do these things for the community, schools and local governments,” he said. “I would love for people to call me up if they want something like this. It cheers people up.”