A gigantic journey through Australia’s Big Things

The joke is the entry point

There are, by one count, 1,075 Big Things, though the number is always moving. They sprawl across every state and territory, clustered along highways and scattered through towns those highways increasingly bypass. Some are sculptures; others are buildings that happen to look like fruit, fish or a pineapple you can walk inside.

The question of which one was first is more contested than it ought to be. The Big Banana at Coffs Harbour, built by John Landi in 1964, usually gets the credit. It set the template: roadside, photogenic, attached to a business, gesturing at a regional product. But the actual oldest is Ploddy the Dinosaur, who has stood at the Australian Reptile Park since 1963.

Ploddy tends to get quietly disqualified. Ploddy is neither fruit nor native fauna nor obviously regional, which is to say, he doesn't fit the genre he predates.

A 1963 Cinesound newsreel covering Operation Crocodile captures this perfectly. Four expedition vehicles are being loaded in the park forecourt, and there, across the right side of the frame, his pale concrete bulk dwarfing the Land Rovers beneath him, is Ploddy.

He is not named, introduced or given a single sentence of Phil Haldeman’s commentary. He is simply there, the largest object in the shot and the only one nobody mentions. The original Big Thing was treated as set dressing for the expedition: present at the founding moment, disqualified from being the founder, looming in the background of someone else’s story.

The roadside colossus flourished wherever cars, highways and small towns intersected. What is specific to the Australian version is not the form, but what the form has been asked to carry: identity, regional anxiety and unfinished settler reckoning, accumulated over 60 years on fibreglass fruit-shaped shoulders.

The joke is, genuinely, a joke. The Big Banana is funny. The Big Prawn is funny. The Big Lobster, looming red and antennaed over Kingston, is exquisitely funny. The question is what kind of joke.

The Australian academic Trudy Allen has written about the ‘totemisation of the inane’, a phrase that does a lot of work in a small space. The Big Things are totems, loosely speaking: markers a community has agreed are significant because the town has decided they matter. But what they are totems of is the inane: fruit, fish, agricultural produce and roadside fauna elevated to monumental scale. The seriousness of the gesture and the unseriousness of the totem are held together in the same object, and in that friction is where the laugh lives.

Australia has a long-standing cultural preference for puncturing earnestness and suspecting anything that asks to be taken seriously. The Big Thing fits this mood because it is a monument that knows it is ridiculous: a statue in quotation marks, a civic gesture with one eyebrow raised.

Artist Reg Mombassa once compared the Big Things to pyramids and temples, a way for a recently settled European population to say, in effect: we’re here, this is our place. The line is usually quoted as a joke, or half a joke; but the half that isn’t joking is the half this whole big article is about.

The Big Things are monumental shorthand for a settler population without the historic infrastructure of belonging, building its own from fibreglass, concrete and the postwar boom. That the materials were unserious does not mean the gesture was.

You can see this comic register in two NFSA-held works. Magda’s Big Things knows the joke and tells it well: the comedian as fond ironist, the Big Thing as affectionate sketch comedy. Big Dreamers, by contrast, honours the builders and makers and community: the people who made the things, and the impulse behind the object.

The chuckle is real, but it’s also blunt, telling you something is funny without explaining why. Underneath is a human need for a marker, a meeting place, a reason to slow down, dressed up as a joke so that nobody has to admit they wanted it.

What is left in the paddock, when you have stopped laughing at the Big Prawn, is a 13-metre prawn, a small town that built it, and a stretch of highway that the prawn was built to slow down. None of those things is funny, exactly. But none of them is visible until you stop laughing.

The Big Things are products of the highway, designed for an audience travelling at 100 km per hour, with maybe four seconds to decide whether to pull over. This is why the iconography is so direct: a banana is a banana, a prawn is a prawn, a merino is unmistakable from half a kilometre away. The language of the Big Thing is the language of the billboard, processed at speed.

Their history is inseparable from postwar car culture: family motoring, the long-distance domestic holiday, the highway as national institution. With it came a roadside economy of motels, service stations and tourist stops, breaks in a longer journey. The Big Thing belongs to this economy completely; not quite a destination, not quite an arrival, but a pause.

What is interesting is that people develop relationships with these objects. Not deep ones, but persistent. They remember which Big Things they have visited, keep mental lists, correct each other on whether the Big Pineapple is bigger than the Big Banana (it is), and share pictures and memories. The Big Thing has somehow acquired the mentality of a place, even though it was built only as a sign.

Part of what produces this is the photograph.

The size of the Big Things disqualifies the selfie. You cannot stand at arm’s length from the Big Merino and produce a satisfying composition; the Merino will be cropped to one enormous concrete leg and a suggestion of fleece. To photograph yourself with a Big Thing properly, you have to stand back, and that means another person holding the camera.

So you hand your phone to your travelling companion, or your kids, or a stranger. The stranger takes the photograph, probably twice, because the first one had a finger in it. Then you reciprocate, taking their family’s photograph in front of the same fibreglass strawberry. A small social transaction has happened, manufactured by the object itself.

Australian regional travel is profoundly lonely: the long drives, the air-conditioned car, the lockable motel room, the thousand kilometres of windscreen and bugs. The photograph is the excuse for the encounter, but the encounter itself is the event. The fibreglass orange brought everyone into the same paddock.

The photograph is the point

The NFSA holds several films that capture this dynamic from the inside, often without quite realising it. Weird and Wonderful, a piece of early ‘80s travel-magazine television, takes the conventional approach: the Big Thing as eccentric Australian curio, narrated with cheerful condescension. Go Figure, made later, is more self-aware but works the same territory: the Big Things as the country’s lovable peculiarity.

What both films capture almost as a side effect is the choreography of the roadside visit: families filing out of station wagons, kids climbing on plinths, someone patiently photographing Mum and Dad in front of something Big. The clips are about the Big Things, but the more interesting footage is of the people standing in front of them.

The photograph and the object reinforce each other in a closed loop. You go to the Big Banana because you have seen the photograph; you take the photograph because you have gone to the Big Banana. The town survives on the small revenue this loop produces. The Big Thing is a strategy for being remembered by people who are used to not stopping.

Claiming the new place

John Landi was an immigrant. So were a surprising number of people who built Australia’s Big Things.

The postwar migration boom brought people from Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Malta, the Netherlands and Germany into agricultural regions of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. They moved into towns where they were expected to grow bananas, sugar cane or tobacco. Many of them did exactly that. Some also built gigantic fibreglass and concrete products.

This is not a coincidence; the Big Thing is a way of making a place legible to oneself by making it monumental. It is difficult to dismiss a 15-metre piece of fruit beside the highway. It is there, you built it, the town accepted it. Which means, in some indirect but real sense, it accepted you too.

What makes the Big Things more interesting than a simple story of homesickness is that they rarely depict the home country. The migrant builders were not memorialising what they had left; they were claiming what they had arrived at. It was the gesture of someone deciding to stay.

The fantasy of abundance is part of this. The Big Things are almost uniformly monuments to plenty, depicting the new country as fertile, productive and generous. This is partly an advertising claim – ‘come and visit, eat our mangoes’ – and partly reassurance. The migration was difficult, and the land took some getting used to. But the Big Pineapple, by its sheer size, says: ‘but look what came out of it.’

The Big Things were built by people whose own claim to the land was, in the long view, recent. The migration that produced them is part of a longer history of arrival, settlement and replacement. This is not an accusation but a description of what the structure does. The Big Things make the country legible as a particular kind of place and history: persistently and at scale, in fibreglass and concrete, on every regional highway.

What gets stored

The Big Merino, when it opened in Goulburn in 1985, was an advertisement. It stood beside the Hume Highway and pointed, 15 metres of concrete and steel, at the wool industry that had built the town. It was modelled on a real local stud ram named Rambo, the kind of detail that does more for the argument than any amount of theory: a town with a stud ram famous enough to model a giant sheep on is a town that knows what it is.

In 2007, the Hume Highway was rerouted, and the bypass would have left the Big Merino on the wrong side, so Goulburn moved it. They moved a massive concrete sheep across town at considerable expense to themselves. The decision tells you something: by 2007, the Big Merino had stopped being an advertisement and had become something the town was not willing to lose.

This is the move the Big Things make, slowly enough that it is hard to notice while it is happening. They start as place markers and become place makers. Goulburn is the town with the Big Merino, Coffs Harbour is the town with the Big Banana, and Ballina is the town with the Big Prawn.

Which means the Big Things have ended up doing a job they were not hired to do. They were hired to advertise; they have ended up storing identity. Which raises a question the Big Things themselves rarely raise: what gets stored, and what gets left out.

Think of the Big Trout at Adaminaby (the ladder in the image below indicates its impressive size and scale). Built in 1973, it celebrates the local fishery. But that fishery was created by stocking rivers with rainbow and brown trout from Europe and North America, displacing native species already present. The Big Trout is a monument to a successful introduced species and, without quite meaning to, to the replacement of one ecology with another.

Painting the Big Trout at Adaminaby. Still from The Last Dream. NFSA ID: D1BNJ518

This is not a complaint about the trout or Adaminaby. It is a description of what monuments do: they tell short stories about places, and those stories are determined by the genre. A monument to the local fishery cannot easily also be a monument to what the fishery replaced.

The pattern is difficult to miss once you start looking. The Big Banana celebrates the banana industry. The Big Pineapple celebrates Queensland agriculture. The Big Merino celebrates the wool industry, built on a Spanish breed of sheep introduced onto land managed for tens of thousands of years before the Merino arrived. The Big Things are, almost without exception, monuments to what came after: the crop, the herd, the catch, the industry.

Australia has spent much of the last 50 years trying to look more closely at what came before. The Big Things have not really participated in that reckoning. They continue to celebrate what they were built to celebrate, in the language of postwar regional optimism and agricultural confidence. They sit slightly to one side of the larger conversation, still saying what they were built to say.

Looked at across the whole network, the Big Things are a kind of distributed memory: what postwar Australia wanted to remember about itself, frozen in reclaimed scrap and scattered along highways. They remember the bananas, the trout, the Merino, the prawn, the pineapple. What they do not remember, they do not pretend to remember. The silence is at least honest about being a silence.

The list of Big Things keeps growing

Something happens to people who become interested in the Big Things.

You start by encountering one. The Big Banana on a family holiday when you were eight; the Big Oyster glimpsed from the back seat on a drive you won’t remember. The encounter is unremarkable in the moment: a stop, a photograph, an ice cream, a stretch of the legs. Years later, you find yourself driving past the Big Merino, and something stirs. You pull in. You take the photograph. You notice, slightly to your own surprise, that you are pleased.

And then, at some point, you realise you are keeping a list. You realise that everyone you know who has been on a long Australian road trip is also keeping a list, often without admitting it. You have seen the Big Lobster. They have seen the Big Galah. Neither of you has seen the Big Earthworm at Bass, which both of you now want to.

The Big Things are unlike almost any other category of public sculpture. A statue in a town square is meant to be encountered on its own. The Big Things assume each other. Once there are enough of them, they become a network rather than a collection of objects; the meaning of any single Big Thing is shaped partly by the others around it.

It is not exactly tourism in the conventional sense. Most people visit them as a side effect of travelling elsewhere. It is closer to collecting: stamp albums, spotter’s guides, the pleasure of filling in another square on a map you did not know you owned.

The visit becomes an act of participation rather than an aesthetic encounter. You do not really visit the Big Pineapple because you have a strong relationship with pineapples or fibreglass; you visit because the Big Pineapple is on the list, and visiting is what one does. Most public sculptures want you to look at them. The Big Things want you to count them.

There is something melancholic about this. The serial logic of the genre means that no one Big Thing can ever quite be enough; there is always another one you have not seen. While new things climb ever higher, older things are falling into disrepair, being relocated or quietly disappearing, so the list is moving in both directions at once. To love the Big Things is to love a fundamentally incomplete category.

Built to fade

The big thing nobody mentions about the Big Things is that a great many of them are quietly falling apart.

A Big Thing is a large piece of fibreglass or concrete exposed to Australian weather for 60 years. The fibreglass cracks. The paint flakes. The concrete spalls. In coastal towns, the sheet metal rusts at a rate that would alarm any structural engineer. These objects were not built for permanence; they were built for a tourist season, and then another, and then another.

The economics are unforgiving. Most Big Things were built beside small businesses: fruit stalls, roadhouses, tourist parks. When those businesses close, change hands or lose passing traffic, the structures become expensive inheritances. Heritage listing can help, but protection is not restoration. A fibreglass prawn that needs structural work still needs someone to pay for it.

The real threat is the highway itself. Most Big Things were built to catch passing motorists when the highway ran through town. For the last 40 years, Australian road policy has steadily moved highways around towns instead. From a road-engineering perspective, the bypass is an improvement. From the perspective of a Big Thing built to be visible from a road that no longer exists, it is an extinction event in slow motion.

The NFSA holds news footage of several of these moments. There is the Big Potato at Robertson going up for sale, the concrete tuber that barely resembles a potato anymore. There is the Big Apple, relocated more than once, now in a form long-time residents struggle to match their childhood memories. There is the unveiling of Nyngan's Big Bogan in 2015: partly joke, partly anxiety about how to stay visible in a country reorganising itself around bypasses and shrinking regional economies.

These reports tell a particular story - not that the Big Things are dying, exactly, as new ones are still being built; rather, an ecosystem has lost the conditions that originally produced it. The Big Things were a response to family motoring, crop economies and highways that ran through towns rather than around them. Those conditions have changed. The objects are still standing, but in a country that no longer needs them as much.

And yet the impulse survives; towns are still commissioning giant sculptures that are absurd and locally meaningful; the calculation that produced the Big Banana in 1964 is still being made in regional council meetings 60 years later.

You drive on. You add the Big Galah to the list. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you note that you still have not seen the Big Earthworm at Bass. You’ll see it eventually.

There will be more by then.