The brilliant Boxing Croc
Australia’s “Big Things” – giant models of everything from crocs to guitars – are being heritage-listed and recognised as works of art.
The kitsch structures, produced by rural towns keen to put themselves on the map, have gathered such a following they are even being compared to Egypt’s pyramids.
“They’re like our pyramids, our temples,” said artist Reg Mombassa told AFP.
“Because European settlement was so recent, Australia doesn’t have historic old buildings like in other countries and the Big Things are a way of saying ‘we’re here, this is our place.’”
Australia has more than 150 Big Things, including the Big Banana at Coffs Harbour, the Big Trout at Adaminaby and the Big Gumboot, an oversized wellington that adorns Australia’s wettest town, Tully in Queensland.
More examples include the Giant Worm, celebrating the oversize invertebrates found near Bass, the Big Cigar in Churchill and Humpty Doo’s Big Boxing Crocodile.
Mombassa, internationally renowned for his designs for surfware brand Mambo, said he first fell in love with them when travelling around Oz in the 1970s and 1980s.
“You’d be on these long, long trips and they’d break up the tedium,” he said.
He described their tackiness as part of their charm.
“Some of them are pretty crappy,” he said. “But others are folk art, definitely.
“You look at the Big Merino (a sheep in Goulburn weighing almost 100 tonnes) where they’ve recreated the texture of the wool in concrete. Or the Golden Guitar, that’s a beautiful-looking guitar.”
The Big Things’ highest accolade came earlier this year when the Queensland government placed the Big Pineapple on its heritage register, ranking it among the state’s top historic buildings and cultural sites.
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