This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
22.64366° S, 133.34280° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Seventeen metres high and eight tonnes, standing on a hill above a roadhouse in the middle of the continent.
The Anmatjere Man is a sculpture by Mark Egan, and it overlooks Aileron and the surrounding country from a rise beside the Stuart Highway about 130 kilometres north of Alice Springs. It is visible for a long way in either direction, which in this landscape means a very long way indeed, and it is among the largest figurative sculptures in Australia.
Scale is doing something specific here. Most oversized objects are a joke about size. A monumental human figure is not funny; it reads as a monument in the conventional sense, and putting one on a hill above a highway in the Anmatjere region makes an unmissable statement about whose country the road is crossing.
Aileron has leaned into the effect. There is a Big Man walk up to the sculpture, and the settlement also carries its own version of a Hollywood-style hillside sign.
The roadhouse below is worth the stop for another reason entirely. It holds a collection of original Albert Namatjira watercolours – Namatjira being among the most significant Australian artists of the twentieth century, and the man who made Central Australian landscape painting internationally known. Finding original works by him hanging in a roadhouse three hours out of Alice is genuinely startling.
A companion sculpture of an Anmatjere woman and child stands nearby, so the figure is not alone.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Tourism NT currently describes the Anmatjere Man as a 17-metre-high, eight-tonne sculpture by Mark Egan, visible from the Stuart Highway. Current Aileron visitor material promotes a Big Man walk to the sculpture.
ACCESS
The Anmatjere Man stands on the hill west of Aileron Roadhouse. Its mapped sculpture point is separate from the vehicle arrival: navigate to Aileron Roadhouse, then approach the hilltop sculpture on foot when conditions allow.
