This Big Thing is recorded for its history. It is no longer at this location, so it is not a stop to plan a trip around.
The surviving former Big Cheese visitor-centre building at Bodalla, opened in the mid-1980s as novelty architecture for the dairy industry but no longer operating as a tourist attraction.
Limited access
Check the access notes for details before visiting
Private to your Passport.
PLANNING A VISIT?
Not a stop to travel to
This Big Thing is recorded for its history. It is no longer at this location, so it is not a stop to plan a trip around.
This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 36.0821° S, 150.0494° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
The building is a wheel of cheese. Not decorated like one – shaped like one, a great cylindrical drum sitting beside the Princes Highway at Bodalla, built in the mid-1980s as a visitor centre, retail outlet and milk bar for the local dairy industry.
Bodalla cheese was a genuine national brand. The district was developed from the 1860s as a large dairying estate and the name carried real weight on a cheese wrapper for over a century, which is what made a cheese-shaped building a reasonable proposition rather than a joke: travellers on the coastal highway between Sydney and the Victorian border already knew what Bodalla meant.
Its tourism life has ended. The building no longer operates as an attraction, though it survives at 20 Princes Highway and remains in commercial use – which puts it in an unusual category. It is not demolished, not derelict and not relocated. It is simply no longer doing the job it was shaped for, which is why it is filed here as inaccessible rather than lost – the structure survives, the function does not.
Novelty architecture ages awkwardly in exactly this way. A conventional building can change tenants indefinitely without anybody minding. A building shaped like a wheel of cheese carries its original purpose in its geometry, and every subsequent occupant inherits a premises that is permanently making a claim about dairy products.
It is still worth looking at from the road. Buildings-as-objects at this scale were never common and are becoming rarer, and this is one of the more committed examples left standing on the New South Wales coast.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
The Big Cheese is the surviving former visitor-centre building at Bodalla, distinctive for its novelty cheese-wheel form. The building still stands at 20 Princes Highway but no longer operates as a tourist attraction.
ACCESS
The structure survives, but no Big Thing visitor navigation is provided because the property is now commercial/private rather than an operating tourist attraction.
