The Big Bogong Moth

The bogong moth is an extraordinary choice. Every spring, hundreds of millions of them fly from the plains of inland Queensland and New South Wales to the Australian Alps, where they spend the summer packed into cool granite caves and crevices at altitude, then fly back to breed and die. It is one of the great insect migrations on earth, navigated in part by the Earth's magnetic field, and it passes directly over this country.

The moths were also a food source of real importance. Aboriginal groups travelled into the high country each summer for the bogong harvest, and large gatherings of people from different nations took place around it. Those events are part of the alpine region's history in a way little else is.

And the moths are in trouble. Numbers collapsed catastrophically in the late 2010s during drought, the species is now listed as endangered internationally, and the mountain pygmy-possum – which depends on the moths for food when it wakes from hibernation – is directly threatened by the decline.

So an oversized bogong moth is a monument to a migration that may not survive the century. Very few Big Things carry that.

The installation date and the builder were left unrecorded.