This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
35.31815° S, 149.09389° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Oversized Australian coins outside the building that makes Australian coins. There is no distance at all between the sculpture and its subject.
The Big Coins sit beside the Royal Australian Mint in Deakin, the facility that has produced the country's circulating currency since it opened in 1965 and which strikes every coin in every pocket in the nation. Putting enlarged versions of that output on the lawn is the most literal possible piece of signage, and it is genuinely rare: almost every oversized object in this catalogue depicts something made, grown or caught somewhere else.
Coins are also unusually good subjects for enlargement. They are already relief sculpture – designed to be read at a few centimetres, with lettering, portraiture and detail worked to a fraction of a millimetre – so scaling one up reveals a level of craft that nobody normally sees. The Mint's own engravers spend careers on work that most people never look at directly.
The Mint has a related habit worth noting: it has issued an Aussie Big Things coin series, putting objects like the Big Galah at Kimba onto legal tender. So the institution behind these sculptures also puts other Big Things onto coins, which produces a pleasing circularity – a giant coin outside the place that miniaturises giant things.
Current visitor material still treats the coins as a Canberra attraction, and Wikimedia's maintained sculpture record supplies an exact mapped position and identifies the work as a Big Thing of Australia.
The record does not carry any figures for its size, the year or the hand behind it.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Current visitor material still treats the Big Coins as a Canberra attraction beside the Royal Australian Mint; Wikimedia’s maintained sculpture record supplies an exact mapped position and identifies the work as a Big Thing of Australia.
ACCESS
At the Royal Australian Mint precinct on Denison Street. Use the Mint visitor destination and lawful visitor parking rather than stopping solely for the roadside sculpture.
