This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
38.31336° S, 146.41764° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Everyone in the Latrobe Valley calls it the Big Cigar. Officially it is the Churchill Town Symbol, and the gap between those two names is the whole story.
The 32-metre spire was commissioned by the Housing Commission in 1967 as a beacon for Churchill, then a brand-new town built to house workers in the valley's power industry. A settlement with no history and no landmark needed something visible to orient itself around, and the tower was designed to be exactly that – an abstract marker, not a representation of anything.
The town named it otherwise. Churchill is named for Winston Churchill, Churchill famously smoked cigars, and the spire is a tall tapering cylinder. Local urban legend duly holds that the monument was a tribute to the man's cigars, and the nickname stuck so thoroughly that it effectively replaced the real one.
The response was unusually formal. A local association successfully applied to Latrobe City Council to register the name Churchill Town Symbol on the Victorian Register of Geographic Names, specifically to recognise the monument's artistic value and its actual origin. That is a rare move: a community going to a statutory naming register to correct a joke about its own landmark.
Both names now coexist, which is the honest outcome. Latrobe City Council and the Victorian Government recognise the Town Symbol; everybody says Big Cigar.
The council has since restored the tower's programmable lighting, and a licensed photograph from May 2026 confirms it standing.
Nicknames are difficult to legislate away, and the association has done the tower no harm. A 1967 abstract spire that nobody had a name for would almost certainly be less loved than a monument the whole valley calls the Big Cigar.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Standing 32 metres tall, the Churchill Town Symbol – long known locally as the Big Cigar – is one of the Latrobe Valley's most distinctive landmarks. Latrobe City Council and the Victorian Government formally recognise it as the Churchill Town Symbol rather than as a literal cigar monument. The council has restored its programmable lighting, and a May 2026 licensed photograph confirms it remains standing.
ACCESS
The Churchill Town Symbol / Big Cigar stands beside Monash Way in Churchill's town-centre shopping precinct. Business directories consistently place the town's main (Woolworths/BWS-anchored, 179-bay) shopping-centre car park at the corner of Marina Drive and Monash Way, roughly 200m from the statue; a smaller Georgina Place strip of shops sits nearby too. Use this public shopping-centre car park and approach on foot; the exact vehicle entrance has not yet been independently map-checked.
Field-visited specialist Big Things page; embedded named Churchill Big Cigar map point resolves to -38.31335767956515, 146.41763535078255. Used with independent Latrobe City heritage/tourism evidence for the object point, not as parking geometry.
Wikimedia Commons / Alison Newman · recorded 2026-09-01
Fresh 16 May 2026 photograph explicitly identified as the Big Cigar in Churchill and photographed from directly opposite on Monash Way. Useful for current-presence and site-context corroboration; camera position is not treated as the object coordinate.
Community
What we're still checking
Current attraction geography remains locality-level because Sprint 8 did not find defensible mapped/GIS/geotagged site or object geometry.
A safe recommended vehicle arrival point has not yet been independently verified.
Something not right?
If this Big Thing has changed, moved or gone, telling us keeps the guide honest for the next traveller.
