Du started making his first didgeridoos very soon after he started playing didgeridoo. It seemed to be the best option in the didgeridoo isolation he was in.

It all started in his grandmother’s basement where wood was kept. With time, the workshop expanded to the nearby corridor, and after many years Du’s workshop also occupied his father’s workshop in a neighboring room. At some point, the wall between the two workshops fell and the workplace grew to almost ten square meters! Now that was a paradise! This room even had a two-floor setup for keeping wood. Room for finishing was one of his grandmother’s rooms upstairs, completely deprived of its primary function.

At that time, Du made didgeridoos with his friend and fellow didgeridoo player from the first bands, Svilko. Together they founded Didgiland, Croatian didgeridoo association, as well as making two hundred or so didgeridoos for their Croatian friends. The didgeridoo scene began to grow, but Du was finding more and more his own way, and many new life situations arose.

Because of the length of his instruments, and the fact that he started to drill them, Du had to break another wall in the basement. He now had three rooms under his wind commandments, and the very first Duende didgeridoos were made there. But this happiness did not last long as Du was thrown out of the basement by the house owner, not because of his wall-breaking abilities, but because the owner had another plan with the basement.

At that time Danka had already joined the team, and Svilko went his own way, leaving them with his eternal cosmic support. So Du and Da found themselves on the street with tools, wood and machines they had been collecting for years, having nowhere to make didgeridoos. But they knew it was important not to stop. So they put some things into the grandmother’s room. Wood supply went into Danka’s family house in a nearby little town, the drilling machine went into a garage in another part of Zagreb, and finishing was done in Du and Danka’s apartment. So the workshop was separated in four strange places and it was sort of awkward if someone forgot some tool or material in another workshop. The other cheerfully interesting point was winter in the garage. Without any heating, with open doors, with cars passing by and leaving their lovely smoke trace, around three hours of packing and traveling, it gave a whole new definition of will to didgeridoo crafting. Still, Duende didgeridoos somehow continued to emerge regardless of their unusual environment.

The year after changed for the better as Du and Danka got a room in a squatted house by an art association. They got a door, a ceiling over their head, which is still a ceiling although is leaking badly, 10 degrees more in winter than in the garage – so it is now a very cozy place. New instruments have never been coming better, and the first Duende didgeridoos have mostly come out of that place.

Now we have a new self-built workshop, one which finally could balance all our needs even though it is still not quite finished.

Finally, we would like to express our view that it is not just the people who continued to make instruments regardless of their situation, but Duende didgeridoos themselves, who found their way to emerge, to show us the beauty of the wind world they come from.