Big Casuarina Pods

Canberra City, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

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Public art

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Checked by Project Big Things · Aug 2026

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Matthew Harding’s bronze Casuarina Pods enlarge seed pods into public sculpture.

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Big Casuarina Pods

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35.28229° S, 149.13379° E

FIELD GUIDE

The story

Three bronze seed pods tumbling down a grassy slope, each many times the size of the real thing.

Matthew Harding's Casuarina Pods take the small, hard, woody cone of the she-oak and enlarge it until the structure becomes visible. That is the whole argument for the work. A casuarina pod is about the size of a thumbnail and is covered in a dense pattern of valves that open to release seed – a geometry nobody examines because the object is too small to reward it. At sculpture scale the pattern becomes architecture.

The arrangement does the rest. ACT Government walking-trail material describes the three pods as tumbling down the slope, which is exactly what real ones do: they fall, roll and scatter. Setting them at different points on a grassy incline turns three static objects into a moment of motion, and means the work reads differently from every direction.

Casuarinas matter in this landscape. She-oaks line the watercourses through Canberra and the surrounding tablelands, and their fine drooping foliage makes the characteristic sound the tree is known for in wind. They are among the most ordinary trees in the district and among the least looked at.

Harding was one of Australia's more accomplished sculptors of natural forms before his death, and the pods are a good example of his method: take something native, overlooked and small, and make it impossible to walk past.

The work remains part of the ACT public art collection.

PRACTICAL

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WHAT TO EXPECT

Current ACT Government walking-trail material describes three oversized seed pods tumbling down a grassy slope; the work remains part of the ACT public-art collection.

ACCESS

Public pedestrian artwork in central Canberra. Do not route vehicles directly to the sculpture.

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