This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 30.3195° S, 153.0890° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Coffs Harbour already has the most famous banana in Australia. This is the other one.
The Big Bunch of Bananas stands outside Cunningham's Bananas, a roadside fruit shop south of Coffs Harbour, and it has an origin that most Big Things would rather not admit to: it moved because the traffic did. The bunch originally advertised Cunningham's stall near Sawtell. When the Pacific Highway bypass rerouted the passing traffic, the business and its giant bananas relocated together to their present site.
That is the entire economics of the roadside Big Thing, laid bare. These objects are not monuments; they are signs, and a sign is worth exactly as much as the number of cars that pass it. Australia's highway upgrades over the past three decades have killed a great many small businesses on old alignments, and with them the oversized objects out the front. Cunningham's picked theirs up and followed the road, which is a rarer and more determined response than simply closing.
The Coffs coast grows bananas because the north-facing hillsides here catch enough warmth to ripen a subtropical crop this far south, and the industry has shaped the town's landscape and identity for a century – hence the Big Banana up the highway, and hence this.
A December 2023 geotagged photograph and 2026 local reporting both confirm the landmark and the fruit shop at the current site, so it remains a working stop rather than a relic.
It is worth being clear about the relationship with the more famous object up the road. The Big Banana at Coffs Harbour, opened in 1964, is one of the oldest and best known Big Things in Australia and has grown into a full commercial park. This is a separate and much smaller landmark belonging to a different family business, and the two are regularly confused in listings and photographs.
The distinction matters for the record. A single town holding two independent oversized banana landmarks, one of them nationally famous and one of them a working fruit shop's sign, is exactly the kind of detail a catalogue exists to keep straight.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
The landmark and roadside fruit shop remain current. A December 2023 geotagged photograph and 2026 local reporting corroborate the present-day site.
ACCESS
Navigate to Cunningham's Bananas at 393 Pacific Highway and use the business car park. Do not stop on the Pacific Highway shoulder to photograph the landmark.
