A giant eyeball scans Ringwood Square collecting data. Spunky staggers through the crowd, trying to scab a ciggy. Roo Girl is lost in the music on her headphones. Scammer is looking for donations, ‘in just five easy payments, the equivalent of a cup of coffee a day’. Roo Girl brushes him aside, but Spunky is a better target. It takes the one-legged magpie to see through the scam and, with the help of Roo Girl, overcome the all-seeing eye and save Spunky from himself.

Five Easy Payments is an outdoor giant puppet performance set in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, tackling themes of surveillance and fraud in the modern world. Five Easy Payments was created by VCAL students from Swinburne University, in collaboration with Snuff Puppets as a People Puppet Project, and in partnership with the City of Maroondah.

Facilitated and directed by Snuff Puppets artists Nick Wilson, Stéphane Hisler, Lachlan Plain and Lauren Bok.

Images by Stéphane Hisler

Five Easy Payments: A People’s Puppet Project by Snuff Puppets and VCAL Students from Swinburne University is a Maroondah City Council project funded by Creative Victoria and supported by Eastland and Swinburne University.