The Big Brown Snake

The method sets it apart from almost every other oversized animal in the country. The process began with a 3D scan of a real eastern brown snake, so the proportions, the scale pattern and the way the body coils are not an artist's approximation but measurements taken from an actual animal, reproduced at enormous magnification using digital manufacturing.

The building underneath gives it a purpose beyond spectacle. The Weigel Venom Centre is where the park milks Australia's deadliest land snakes, sending the venom away to be made into antivenom – a programme that has saved a great many lives and which most Australians have no idea depends on a wildlife park on the Central Coast. The eastern brown matters most to that work, being responsible for more snakebite deaths in Australia than any other species.

So the statue is a sign in the truest sense. It names, at unmissable scale, exactly what happens in the building it sits on.

There is a small irony in the siting. The most-feared snake in the country is now the most conspicuous object at a facility whose entire purpose is making its bite survivable.