This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
17.89750° S, 146.09174° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
The right bird in the right place, which is not always the case.
Mission Beach and the Wongaling Beach area hold one of the most important remaining populations of southern cassowaries in Australia. The birds genuinely walk through this district – across roads, through gardens, along the beach track – and the local signage, speed limits and community programmes exist because of them.
Southern cassowaries are endangered, and they matter beyond themselves. They are the only animal that can swallow the large fruits of many rainforest trees whole and carry the seeds long distances, so a substantial part of the wet tropics forest depends on them for regeneration. Lose the cassowary and the forest changes composition over generations.
They are also formidable: up to nearly two metres tall, flightless, with a bony casque and a dagger-like inner claw, and capable of serious injury when cornered. Vehicle strike, dog attack and habitat loss are the main threats, not the other way round.
So a giant cassowary at a shopping village is doing something practical as well as decorative – it is the district announcing what it lives with. The catalogue's other threatened-species monuments, the Strathmerton superb parrot and the Tintaldra bogong moth, work the same way.
The object sits at the corner of Tully Mission Beach Road and Wongaling Beach Road, inside the shopping precinct that takes its name from the bird.
Its construction, the year, an attribution and its scale were never written down.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
A quick photo stop within a shopping precinct at the corner of Tully Mission Beach Road and Wongaling Beach Road.
ACCESS
The Big Cassowary stands at the south-east corner of Tully Mission Beach Road and Wongaling Beach Road. OpenStreetMap independently maps the sculpture itself at approximately -17.89750, 146.09174, separate from the Cassowary Shopping Village visitor destination. Use lawful shopping-village parking and do not stop on the surrounding roadway.
Object-level tourism=attraction node maps The Big Cassowary at approximately -17.89750, 146.09174, distinct from the shopping-village landuse centroid.
Community
Something not right?
If this Big Thing has changed, moved or gone, telling us keeps the guide honest for the next traveller.
