This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 23.7016° S, 133.8830° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
The oversized books outside the Alice Springs Public Library are spines, and they all belong to the same author: Nevil Shute.
Shute was an English aeronautical engineer who became a novelist and moved to Australia after the Second World War. His best-known book, published in 1950, is A Town Like Alice – a novel that follows a woman through Japanese captivity in Malaya and then to the Australian outback, and whose title refers to Alice Springs itself as the model of a country town worth building towards. The book, and the film and television adaptations that followed, did more to put the name of Alice Springs in front of overseas readers than any tourism campaign of its era.
So the installation is a town acknowledging a debt. Alice Springs Town Council records the giant book-spine display at the public library, which is exactly the right address for it: not a highway pull-in aimed at passing traffic, but the front of the building where the town keeps its books.
It is a quiet entry in the Big Things canon, and one of the few that is about writing rather than produce, livestock or wildlife. There is no fruit, no animal, and nothing being sold. Just a set of enormous spines outside a library in the centre of the country, naming the novel that made the place famous somewhere else.
Who designed and installed the books, and when, is not established in the record.
There is a further reason the choice fits. Alice Springs has an unusually strong literary and publishing presence for a town of its size, tied to the desert-region Aboriginal art and language work centred there, and the library is a working civic institution rather than a symbolic one.
It is also worth saying plainly that Shute's novel is a book of its time, written by an English migrant in the late 1940s, and its portrait of the outback carries the assumptions of that period. The installation commemorates the book's effect on the town's name rather than endorsing its view of the country, and readers coming to it fresh should know that.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Alice Springs Town Council records the oversized Nevil Shute book-spine installation at the public library. The NT Place Names Register provides a current recorded coordinate for the library site.
ACCESS
At Alice Springs Public Library on the corner of Gregory Terrace and Leichhardt Terrace. Use the public library as the visitor destination and approach the giant book spines on foot.
