This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Approximate location · 33.892° S, 151.041° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
A nine-metre bicycle stands outside a waste transfer station, which is a more thoughtful pairing than it sounds.
John Ridley, Andy Lugiz and Phillip Becker built it in 1997 for the Chullora Waste Transfer Station, at roughly nine metres by six. A recycling facility putting up an enormous bicycle is making a straightforward argument about materials recovered and reused, in the one form that is almost entirely metal and almost entirely recyclable.
Industrial Big Things are a small and under-appreciated category. Councils and utilities occasionally commission them, usually to make an environmental point at a site people would otherwise drive past without thinking about, and they tend to be better built than commercial ones because there is a capital budget rather than a shopfront advertising spend behind them.
The facility has since ceased operating. The bicycle has not gone anywhere – it remains a roadside landmark near Muir Road in Chullora, in the industrial heart of Sydney's inner west, now standing outside something that no longer does what it was built to explain.
That leaves it in an odd position, which is why the record treats it as restricted. It is visible and it is definitely there, but it belongs to a closed industrial site rather than a public park, and the access assumptions that apply to a town-square sculpture do not apply here.
Three named builders on a 1997 council facility sculpture is unusually good attribution for this category. Most industrial Big Things have no recorded maker at all.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
The Big Bicycle remains a roadside landmark near Muir Road in Chullora, but the former recycling facility is no longer operating.
ACCESS
The Big Bicycle remains on the overgrown hill at the Muir Road / Anzac Street corner in Chullora, opposite 26 Muir Road. The former PBT point at -33.892839, 151.045218 reflected an older waste-transfer-station/entrance reference roughly 400 m east of the sculpture. Independent mapped imagery places the bicycle around -33.89213, 151.041265, while current visitor information confirms the same Muir/Anzac hill. Production now uses that as an approximate map-checked object point. Current visitor guidance reports road viewing only and no dedicated parking, so direct vehicle navigation remains withheld.
Mapped Big Bicycle position at approximately -33.89213, 151.041265; used as an approximate object point and corroborated by current Muir Road / Anzac Street location descriptions.
