This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
22.64196° S, 133.34564° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
The Anmatjere Man went up on the hill first. The woman and child came later, in 2008, and they are the reason the site reads as more than a single figure.
The companion group depicts an Anmatjere woman and child with a hunting scene, and it stands at Aileron on the Stuart Highway alongside the seventeen-metre man on the rise above. Travellers are directed to see both: current guidance from the Ti Tree Roadhouse, about sixty kilometres north, tells people heading south to stop at Aileron for the Anmatjere Man and the Anmatjere Woman and Child.
Adding a second work changes the first one. A lone monumental male figure on a hill is a silhouette – impressive, distant, and easy to read as generic. A woman and child at ground level, engaged in an activity, turns the pair into a depiction of people living in country rather than a symbol standing over it. The hunting scene is doing that work specifically: it shows what is being done, not merely who is there.
Aileron itself is a roadhouse and very little else, about 130 kilometres north of Alice Springs on the run toward Ti Tree and Tennant Creek. The sculptures are the reason anyone remembers passing it.
No source located gives the year. That gap is recorded rather than filled.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Current Ti Tree Roadhouse travel guidance explicitly directs travellers to Aileron to see both the Anmatjere Man and the Anmatjere Woman and Child statues. Historical documentation records the companion work being erected in 2008.
ACCESS
The Anmatjere Woman and Child stand north of Aileron Roadhouse and are separately mapped from the roadhouse itself. Navigate to Aileron Roadhouse as the vehicle arrival, then approach the sculpture group on foot.
