This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 21.4226° S, 149.2173° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Buffy was made of papier-mâché for a sugar festival float in 1983, and the town liked him too much to let him go.
Australia's Guide records it directly: he was crafted as a float, the locals could not bear to let him hop away, and he was recast in sturdier material to stay permanently in the centre of Sarina, about thirty-five kilometres south of Mackay.
Parade floats becoming permanent is a recurring route into this catalogue – the Baxter shoe, the Loxton pelican, the Moonbi chook – but Buffy is the only one where the town explicitly rebuilt the object in order to keep it.
The subject is where it gets complicated. Cane toads were introduced to Queensland in 1935 to control beetles in the sugar crop, released near Gordonvale, and comprehensively failed to do it. They then spread across northern Australia, poisoning quolls, goannas, snakes and freshwater crocodiles that try to eat them, and are now one of the most damaging introduced species on the continent. The front has reached the Kimberley.
So a sugar town commemorating a cane toad is commemorating a mistake its own industry made. That is remarkably self-aware for a piece of roadside sculpture, and it is why Buffy is funnier and more interesting than a giant cane stalk would have been.
Queenslanders have long treated the toad with a grim affection – the state's rugby league sides have been called the Cane Toads for decades – and Buffy sits squarely in that tradition.
The hand behind it, a measured size and the year it went up: unknown.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
The sculpture is a recognised Queensland Big Thing in Sarina’s town centre.
ACCESS
Navigate to Broad Street Park on Broad Street, which Mackay Regional Council identifies as home of Buffy. Use the park/nearby legal parking and amenities; do not navigate to or stop at the sculpture coordinate in the Bruce Highway median.
