INTERVIEW BY WILFRED BRANDT

PHOTO BY ELVIS DI FAZIO

Emily Hunt and Raquel Welsh are the two responsible for the Sydney based, celebrity-trash-culture and op-shop fashion obsessed

Duke

magazine. They are an oddly maternal, eerily co-dependent pair and their homely abode above a shop-front on Parramatta Road makes Grey Gardens look like the Ritz. We sat them down to talk about their lives and the elaborate collections that surround them.

Vice: So tell me about your photo frames.

Raquel:

There’s a bunch of rules. If we find a photo of someone in a frame, it stays.

Emily:

If we find a frame that has one of those photos that shows you how to put a photo in a frame, we leave that in too.

OK.

R:

Sometimes we cut pictures out from magazines. Like there’s the picture of Peter Andre and Jordan’s magical wedding, which we stuck in.

E:

It was quite a lowkey wedding, you know.

R:

She came in on a pink horse-drawn pumpkin, and a pink Cinderella outfit.

Is her picture on your Love Wall or is she on the Hate Wall?

R:

She’s on the Love Wall cause she’s pretty fucking awesome.

E:

But Peter Andre’s on the Love and Hate Wall.

R:

Yeah, cause we have like, mixed feelings, y’know.

Alright, what’s with your Charles Manson tapestry?

R:

I made it for an art show. It’s incredible that nobody bought it. How ridiculous! Nobody’s ever going to make a tapestry of him ever again.

And you named the magazine Duke because you’re both obsessed with royalty?

R:

Yeah, but also because we’re obsessed with David Bowie, who’s the Thin White Duke.

I think you guys are obsessed with ordering things. You seem to order everything—all the stuff on your walls and all your books.

E:

We are obsessed with ordering. And Duke is really a way of ordering our thoughts.

So you anthropomorphise everything in the house?

E:

Yeah totally! Everything’s personified. And that’s why we place them together so it creates more of a life. Because when they’re by themselves, it’s just like, they’re lost.

You have a great collection of monkeys. Are they all from the 80s?

R:

Yeah. There was a thing about the 80s with rude chimpanzees acting like humans. But also a thing with a lot of naked women with the chimps as well.

E:

It was all weirdly sexualised.

R:

It was a weird thing with boobs and chimps.

E:

We don’t know why these things happened, but we certainly appreciate them.