This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 34.7203° S, 150.0864° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
The Big Apple at Tallong was made in 1988 for a man, not a town.
Jim Watling was a local orchardist, and the fibreglass apple was built to advertise his business. It was later donated to the Tallong community and installed in what is now Tallong Memorial Park, where it has since been restored. It stands near the entrance to the Jim Watling Walkway – so the man's name is now attached to both the apple and the path, which is a fairly complete piece of village memorialisation.
That trajectory is the standard life cycle of the commercial Big Thing, and Tallong's is a well-documented example of it working. An object built to sell fruit outlives the business, gets handed to the community, becomes civic property and ends up as the centrepiece of a park. The alternative ending – the business closes, nobody owns the object, and it goes to the tip – is at least as common.
Tallong is a small village in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, in country the district's own history dates back to the crossings of the Shoalhaven by Hume, Throsby and Smith in 1818 and 1820. Apple and berry growing on the tablelands here is long established, so the subject is genuinely local.
The park has grown around the apple. Regional tourism describes Memorial Park as showcasing the apple, the Jim Watling Walkway and a sculpture walk through a nature reserve, with a skate park, half basketball court, murals and a gazebo added recently – a village building a public space outward from a single fibreglass fruit.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Current Goulburn-region tourism and Tallong community material confirm the restored Big Apple in Tallong Memorial Park at the entrance to the Jim Watling Walkway and nature reserve.
ACCESS
Navigate to Tallong Memorial Park on Caoura Road and use the park access/parking. The Big Apple is a public park landmark beside the Jim Watling Walkway.
