Look at this bastard.

The story about our logo

You may notice a cartoon of a little fellow wearing a king's crown on our website, emails, reports, and social media.

I taught and led the Aboriginal Women in Research and Evaluation project (AWRAE). The project was a 13-week course teaching all things monitoring and evaluation, and it took place during the pandemic. Di was one of the students. I was Zoomed in to Karratha three days a week for 12 weeks. I could not do face-to-face because Victoria was in lockdown, and West Australia was not accepting interstate arrivals. It was just me and a group of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women learning about monitoring and evaluation remotely.

I had had George for about six months at this point and got him about halfway through a very long Melbourne lockdown. I did most of the AWRAE training during the Victorian lockdown from my bed with George next to me. The women in the course often talked to George over the video and got to know him quite well. George was a real asset. He was cute, helped create a fun environment and helped me and the group connect.

About halfway through the course, I sent some gifts of Melbourne souvenirs to the women. A few weeks after this, I got a missed parcel message and walked up to the post office and got given a huge box addressed to ‘Loz and George’. It had been sent to me by Di, one of the women in the course. The box was full of make-up, socks, scarves, beauty products, dog toys -all sorts of things. It had a king costume for a dog, with a gold crown and blue velvet jacket.

That same day, I had to meet my personal trainer in the park that afternoon, so the king costume went straight on. The costume had a gold buckle at the back where you could attach the lead. And off we went.

The buckle took about two minutes to snap off the costume, leaving George untethered. George immediately sprinted off, with me running behind him. He ran straight into a house with its front door open, followed by me running in behind him, trying to catch him. Fortunately, the house residents thought this was funny. He ran out of the house again and off down the road. At this point, people were on the street taking photos of me chasing a dog wearing a king costume. George then made his way (at quite a rapid pace) to the park, where my personal trainer was waiting. ‘GRAB THAT DOG’ I shouted to my trainer – luckily, she caught him, and that is where the picture you see at the top of the page was taken.

How the logo came to be

I decided I wanted to get a tattoo of George, and I gave my tattooist, Lazy Tattoos, a bunch of photos to choose from. She chose the photo of King George at the top of this page and designed a tattoo, which became our first business logo in 2020.

In 2022, I worked with Natalie Ex, who did an amazing reimaging of George wearing the crown and the cape.

Why George is important

George is an integral part of our work. George loves life and people. He makes people smile during meetings and workshops. He makes a lot of people happy. I want to bring that same enthusiasm into our work. I want to make people smile while they are doing evaluations. He is also very naughty, and those who know me know I have a reputation for being a habitual rule-breaker. My old workplace called me the ‘kawaii disruptor - I stirred things up but made people smile while doing it.

Our old logo

So regal…