This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Approximate location · 34.960° S, 117.357° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Denmark once had the world's largest water barometer, twelve and a half metres of it, in a tower built specially to hold it. Then its owner and the shire fell out, and he took it away.
A water barometer works on the same principle as the mercury kind but needs to be vastly taller, because water is so much less dense – atmospheric pressure will support a column of mercury about 760 millimetres high, but a column of water more than ten metres. That is why they are rare: to build one at all you need a structure tall enough to house it, which is why the Denmark Visitor Centre had a purpose-built Barometer Tower.
The instrument went in during 2007 and worked as a genuine scientific instrument rather than a model, responding to real changes in the weather. It was named for Bert Bolle, its maker.
It came out in February 2011. The ABC reported the barometer being removed following a dispute between its owner and the local shire, and Shire of Denmark records document the disagreement that led to the instrument being returned to its maker. The tower remained; the thing it was built around did not.
That sequence is unusual enough to be worth dwelling on. Big Things are normally lost to fire, storm, rust, redevelopment or simple neglect. This one was lost to a contractual falling-out – an object in perfect working order, removed intact, because the relationship behind it broke down. It is the only entry in the catalogue whose disappearance is best described as a dispute rather than a decay.
The substance of the disagreement is not something the available reporting sets out in detail, and this record does not speculate about it.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Shire of Denmark records and ABC reporting document the dispute that led to the instrument being returned to its maker and removed from the visitor centre in February 2011. It is retained as a historical Big Thing, not a current Denmark attraction.
ACCESS
Historical listing only. Do not navigate to Denmark expecting the barometer to be on display; its later public-display status has not been established.
