This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 28.3545° S, 148.8211° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
They were built for a film, and the film has been almost entirely forgotten while the props remain.
Three oversized boomerangs stand opposite the Nindigully Pub, preserved from the set of Paperback Hero – a 1999 Australian film shot in the district. Objects surviving their production is a small category in this catalogue, shared with the Swan Hill Murray cod, and it produces a particular kind of artefact: something made to be seen from one angle for a few seconds, left standing for decades.
The boomerang itself is an Aboriginal invention, and among the most widely recognised objects Australia has given the world. The returning boomerang used across the south-east is a different thing from the heavier non-returning hunting and fighting boomerangs of much of the continent, and they were made and used by many nations with distinct forms and purposes. These particular objects, though, are film-set props rather than cultural items, and the record does not present them as anything else.
The pub they face is the point of Nindigully. State Library of Queensland material traces its long life: a rough accommodation house by 1906, adjoined to a Commercial Store opened by Jack Sternes in October 1909, sold by Ellen Haines to Sternes in 1927 and renamed the Sternes Hotel, in Sterne family hands until 1960, then licensed to the Czech-born Charles Karel Kotyza who restored the Nindigully Hotel name on 14 September 1961. The local school ran from 1922 to 1941.
Nindigully sits on the Moonie River in the Balonne, and the pub is essentially the town.
No source located gives the height and the fabric of it.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
