The Big Chair

The colour is the entire strategy. Orange against a suburban commercial strip of grey concrete and steel sheds is the single most visible thing on the road, which matters on Woolcock Street, the main northern arterial into Townsville and one of the highest-traffic corridors in north Queensland.

There is no connection between motorcycles and chairs, and that is not an oversight. A dealership does not need a giant motorcycle – it has real ones in the window. What it needs is something that registers at fifty kilometres an hour and is remembered afterwards, and an object with no logical relationship to the business does that better than a literal one would. It is the same reasoning as the red elephant at Plainland.

This is the fifth oversized seat in the catalogue, after the red chairs at Charleville and Withcott, the Dalby camping chair, Igor's chair on Mount Dandenong, and the deck chairs at Winton and Hydeaway Bay. Only the Broken Hill bench and the Winton deck chair carry any local meaning; the rest, this one included, work purely on the joke of being made small.

That is a finding in itself. The chair is the most portable idea in the whole tradition.

The maker, dimensions and installation date are not recorded.