This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Approximate location · 37.675° S, 144.437° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
There are two Big Apples at Bacchus Marsh, and the one people photograph today is not the one that made the place known.
The original was a large red fibreglass apple at the Big Apple Tourist Orchard, and by the accounts of people who saw both, it was significantly bigger than its successor. Photographs of it survive from at least 2010. Age and weather did for it – fibreglass left in the Victorian sun for decades goes chalky, then brittle, then structurally unsound – and in 2012 it was replaced with the smaller apple that stands there now.
The replacement has since been looked after better than the original was. New management took over in 2020 and commissioned artists to repaint the sculpture, and by the account of at least one returning visitor the result was a considerable improvement.
Bacchus Marsh sits between Melbourne and Ballarat in irrigated country long known for orchards and market gardens, and the roadside fruit stall with an oversized version of its own produce out the front was once the standard commercial arrangement along the Western Highway. Most are gone.
What this record preserves is the first apple specifically. The catalogue treats the original as permanently removed rather than folding the two together, because they were different objects of different sizes made at different times, and a visitor comparing an old photograph with what stands there now deserves to know why the fruit has shrunk.
When the original was made is not recorded. Photographs place it in the ground by 2010 and local accounts push it considerably further back, but nobody appears to have written the date down.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
The original Big Apple was a large fibreglass roadside apple that stood at the former Big Apple Tourist Orchard in Bacchus Marsh, a once-common style of oversized fruit sculpture used to draw visitors to the orchard.
ACCESS
Historical record only. Do not navigate to this record as though the original fibreglass apple remains on display.
