This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 38.6945° S, 146.0827° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
When the fish needed restoring, the town rattled tins for it.
Colin Suggett's six-metre mullet has lain across the roof of the Fish Creek Hotel since 1989 – not swimming, not leaping, but lying there dead, which is a bold thing to put on a pub and the reason everyone calls it the Big Dead Fish. It is a considerably funnier object than a heroic leaping version would have been, and it makes the hotel unmistakable from any direction.
The building underneath deserves the attention. The Fish Creek Hotel dates from 1939 and is a genuinely imposing piece of Art Deco in the middle of a small South Gippsland town – the kind of confident interwar building that country Victoria produced and then largely stopped maintaining. This one has been kept.
The restoration story is the one worth telling. In 2016 the community showed its affection for the fish directly: small businesses, residents and the local arts group rattled tins to raise the money to repair it. That is a fundraising method of the most old-fashioned kind, and it is the clearest possible evidence that a piece of privately owned pub signage had become something the town considered its own.
Fish Creek sits on the road toward Wilsons Promontory, so a good deal of traffic heading for the Prom passes the hotel.
The town is named for the creek, the creek is named for its fish, and the hotel has one on the roof. Everything lines up.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Current South Gippsland tourism material explicitly tells visitors to look for the giant fish sculpture by Colin Suggett on the hotel roof. ABC records it as a six-metre work created in 1989, while the hotel remains an active accommodation and dining venue at 1 Old Waratah Road.
ACCESS
Navigate to the Fish Creek Hotel and use the hotel’s own parking rather than stopping in the roadway to photograph the rooftop sculpture.
