This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
28.55136° S, 151.95068° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Built in 1978, and specifically a Royal Gala – which is a small act of confidence, because Royal Gala was barely known in Australia then.
The variety was a New Zealand development, selected from Gala by Bill Ten Hove at Hawke's Bay and patented in the early 1970s, and it went on to become one of the dominant apples of the world. Committing a monument to a named cultivar rather than a generic red apple is unusual, and it dates the object precisely.
The Big Apple stands outside Vincenzo's on the New England Highway at Thulimbah, north of Stanthorpe, in the Granite Belt.
The Granite Belt is the odd corner of Queensland. At around nine hundred metres, on decomposed granite soils, it gets frosts, snow occasionally, and a genuine winter – which is why it grows apples, stone fruit and cool-climate wine grapes in a state otherwise defined by heat. Thulimbah, Applethorpe and the surrounding orchard settlements were built entirely on that anomaly.
Italian families are a large part of that story. Post-war migration brought growers who established much of the district's fruit and vine production, and Vincenzo's name reflects it.
This is the catalogue's second Big Apple. The other, at Batlow in the Snowy Valleys, sits on private orchard land and comes from an equally serious apple district on the other side of the border.
The measurements, the material used and the maker remain blank.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
A Granite Belt roadside landmark at a visitor-friendly commercial venue on the New England Highway.
ACCESS
The Big Apple itself is independently mapped at approximately -28.55136, 151.95068 beside Vincenzo’s at The Big Apple. Use the separate signed venue entrance/customer parking rather than the New England Highway shoulder; the existing visitor arrival remains distinct from the sculpture point.
Object-level tourism=attraction node maps The Big Apple at approximately -28.55136, 151.95068. Wikimedia category independently places the sculpture within about 5 m.
