Quarantine

Quarantine was a furry sharehouse in the Chapel Hill suburb of Brisbane, Australia which operated from 1996-1997. It was the first furry house in Australia. The tenants were Chris Baird, Jason Gaffney ("Jagafeh"), Marko the Rat, Simon Raboczi, David "Desert" Williams. and (briefly) Belinda Kelly.

History

Marko "discovered" Simon from a furry newsgroup post, but the core group of Brisbane natives (Jason, Marko and Simon) who formed the nucleus of the household did not come together until Canadian backpacker John Boulton passed through town in 1994, visiting the local furries he'd located over the internet. The local trio subsequently collaborated on founding the South Fur Lands regional furry fanzine. When Chris from Newcastle (who complained that Brisbane was too hot) moved to Brisbane in early 1996, it precipitated a plan to form a student share-house. To make up the numbers for the all-important individual rent-reduction, they imported Desert from Rockhampton (who complained that Brisbane was too cold).

David moved out later in the year and was replaced for a few weeks by Belinda, until Chris's decision to leave as well precipitated the kind of rental crisis all too common to student sharehouses, and the household disbanded.

Artifacts

• Each member of the house had a different plush toy animal on a shelf in the living room, to be placed on the phone whenever the modem was in use so that everyone else would know not to pick up the handset, and who to complain to for hogging the line. Because the two most frequent users (Chris and Simon) used plush skunks for this purpose, the practice became known as "skunking the phone".
• Five CDs of the "Serkonov" combined domestic file archives were burned when the housemates parted ways. Like Tolkien's cursed rings of power, they are borne in secret as heavy burdens of copyright guilt by the ex-tenants.
• The staple diet of the residents was a Traditional Queensland Uni Student Chili. Desert and Chris had to sustain much criticism on how fiercely hot their cooking was allowed to be.