Eggs are good but chickens themselves aren’t actually very nice. We only overlook their many foibles because they turn the chaos and filth of our compost bins into one of the most elegant and aesthetically pleasing objects in the known universe – an egg.
The other evening after watching Nathan Rees at the state ALP conference carry a vote giving him the power to hire and fire I went down and shut the enclosure to our chook pen.
Two of the birds had escaped the chicken wire and like Kurtz from Apocalypse Now were rogue in the herb patch. I recognised one of the birds straight away. She is an old black hen with a bad attitude and a beak that is always way too quickly drawn. As I approached to ruin her party, she turned and gave me a look with her beady, cranky little eyes and I realised that just a few minutes earlier I had seen the same expression on another face…It took me a moment to remember exactly where. Then it came to me. The Saturday night news footage had shown an unfortunate cutaway shot of powerbroker, Joe Tripodi, who has the most to lose from the recent ALP vote to give the premier extra powers.
He had a mortified look on his face as if he was trying to chew and swallow 49 eggs in a few seconds. The resemblance to the hen was unmistakable – a stare that spoke of a kind of an absence of knowing what the future holds.
And indeed he was exiled from the coop the very next day.
My bitter black chook always seems so busy bossing everyone around that it is a wonder to me she produces the most massive double yolker eggs. And so she is treated as a tolerated grump.

Tripodi too seems so busy scheming and plotting but where are the double yolkers? Except for being the public face of the shipwrecked Pasha Bulker, what is his contribution to public life that people will talk about in 1,000 years?
And who is that other faceless brown bird scratching in the herb garden with Joe the Chook? It’s his bloody mate, Eddie Obeid!
We forgive politicians only because they are there to do a job for us. Their egg-equivalent is turning the chaos of the compost bin that is society into one of the loveliest aspects of humanity – a properly functioning civil society.
When they stop doing that why do we have them?
Even worse, imagine if the chooks formed a conspiracy and decided that even though we keep them fed and watered they make sure their eggs get given to some other egg glutton, not part of my family?
In NSW someone else is getting the eggs – the big donors. It is the developers who seem to be, to borrow Johnny Cash’s apt description, our very own egg sucking dogs.
Even if there is no connection between donating hundreds of thousands of dollars and ticks in the right approval boxes, the look is not good.
And that is why I think so many people breathed a sigh of relief even at the hope that, as Premier Rees promised, developers will be banned from bringing buckets full of cream and cake to the chooks.
Too many good places are being ravaged by the death by a thousand cuts, lots of bad planning decisions that slowly eat communities out from the inside.
Potato peels, apple cores and crusts as well as lots of seed, green pick and plenty of clean water is all that’s needed to make eggs. For too long NSW politicians have run riot in the veggie garden.
What’s going on when the guys the people voted for are making decisions like deciding to change planning laws so as not to have to consider the impact on small retailers when a shopping complex is built? That’s classic egg theft!
Is there really one single genuine egg lover out there who doesn’t want the little guy to be considered?
I am sure being a chicken isn’t easy, after all let your guard down for even a second and all your ‘friends’ will be quickly pecking your neck to the bone.
And it’s probably no fun living on compost. But there is a pact between a family and their chickens: in return for tolerating base behaviour and bad manners all we ask for is our eggs. Good eggs.