This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 31.4980° S, 145.8376° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
If it were filled with actual beer it would hold about twenty-two thousand litres, which is the kind of calculation only a Big Thing invites.
The five-metre Tooheys can sits atop the old Grand Hotel building at 34 Marshall Street in Cobar, accessible at all times, and Visit Cobar's current itinerary still directs visitors to take a selfie with it.
Cobar is a far-western New South Wales mining town, copper and gold, a long way from anywhere on the Barrier Highway. A giant beer can on a pub roof in that country is not subtle and does not need to be.
What is interesting is the company it now keeps. Cobar has quietly assembled a serious cultural offer: the Great Cobar Museum, and the Cobar Sound Chapel – an acoustic artwork built inside a repurposed concrete water tank in the desert, playing a continuous composition by Georges Lentz, which requires booking, a hundred-dollar cash bond and a key collected from the museum. A town with both a rooftop beer can and a commissioned sound installation reached by a bond and a key is not easily categorised.
The can belongs to the older tradition. Brewery-branded oversized objects were once common on Australian pubs and have largely gone, partly through rebranding and partly through alcohol advertising norms shifting.
Surviving on the roof of a heritage hotel building in a mining town is about the best outcome available to one.
Nothing found establishes a measured size.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
NSW Government material identifies the five-metre can at 34 Marshall Street, while Visit Cobar's current itinerary still directs visitors to photograph it atop the old Grand Hotel building.
ACCESS
Treat this as an exterior town-centre photo stop. Use legal Cobar CBD parking and view from the footpath; do not stop in a traffic lane or rely on the old Grand Hotel being open.
