This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 24.3286° S, 151.5605° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Up on the roof since 1979, watching the Bruce Highway go past.
The Big Crab was built above what is now the Miriam Vale service station and restaurant and has marked the stop ever since – forty-six years of continuous service as a landmark, which puts it among the more durable objects in this catalogue and firmly in the classic era of Australian roadside building.
Mud crabs are the local claim, and a strong one. The estuaries and mangrove systems of this stretch of central Queensland coast – Baffle Creek, the Kolan, the inlets around Seventeen Seventy – produce mud crabs that are a serious regional product and a serious local obsession. Miriam Vale has long marketed itself on them.
Red is a deliberate lie, and a good one. A live mud crab is dark green-brown and would vanish against roadside scrub; crabs only turn red when cooked. The sculpture is therefore not a portrait of the animal but of the meal, which is what the roadhouse beneath is selling.
Roof mounting does the same work here as at the Taree oyster and the Lakes Entrance octopus: it lifts the object clear of parked trucks and signage so it reads from a distance at highway speed.
Miriam Vale sits on the Bruce Highway between Gladstone and Bundaberg, at the turnoff to Agnes Water and Seventeen Seventy, so a very large proportion of the traffic passing is already stopping.
Nothing located supplies a measured size, the materials and the name of whoever built it.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
A classic highway Big Thing with a current restaurant/service-station stop directly beneath it.
ACCESS
The Big Crab is at the operating Shell service-station site at the corner of Roe and Dougall Streets, Miriam Vale. Shell publishes the site at approximately -24.328621, 151.560495 and identifies the station as THE BIG CRAB. Use normal service-station access and parking; the stored point is a site anchor rather than an exact crab centroid.
