Big Crayfish – Kaikōura

It has been looked after. Altex Coatings documented a full repaint of the six-metre exterior sculpture in 2020 – an unglamorous detail, but the one that decides whether a fibreglass object on an exposed Pacific coastline lasts decades or falls apart in a few years. Salt air is merciless, and most of the Big Things that have disappeared went that way rather than dramatically.

When it was first built, and by whom, is not established in the record.

One more thing has changed the setting since the sculpture went up. The 2016 Kaikoura earthquake lifted sections of this coastline by several metres, destroyed the road and rail links north and south, and cut the town off for an extended period. The uplift exposed reef that had been permanently submerged and killed a great deal of shellfish along it, and the recovery of the coast and its fisheries has been a long process.

Any Kaikoura landmark that predates 2016 has that in its history, whether or not the object itself was damaged.