This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 41.2379° S, 146.4345° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Sell cherries; put a giant cherry outside. The Cherry Shed at Latrobe compressed the entire logic of the roadside fruit landmark into one decision.
Northern Tasmania grows cherries well – cold winters give the trees the chill they need, and the island's isolation and southern latitude let growers reach the market late, after the mainland crop is finished. Latrobe sits inland from Devonport on the Mersey River, and the Cherry Shed was a farm-gate business of the kind that lives on travellers driving between the ferry terminal and everywhere else.
When the business closed, the sculpture went with it. The Tasmanian Heritage Council's 2024 comparative assessment records the Big Cherry as removed from its site around 2021.
That citation is worth pausing on, because it is unusually good for this kind of object. Most removed Big Things are documented, if at all, by enthusiasts and photographs. Having a heritage council formally note the loss in a comparative assessment puts this one in a much smaller category – an oversized fruit whose disappearance is on a government record.
It also reflects something Tasmania does better than most jurisdictions: treating twentieth-century vernacular and novelty structures as heritage worth assessing rather than as clutter. The Big Penguin, an hour up the coast, is on the Tasmanian Heritage Register. That the cherry was considered in the same frame, even in absence, says the category is being taken seriously.
When it was built, by whom, and where it went afterwards have all gone unrecorded – the heritage assessment noted the loss without documenting the object, which is a fair summary of how these things are usually treated.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
