Big Ears Wheat Sculpture – Mingenew

That Centenary of Federation origin explains a whole wave of Australian public sculpture. Commonwealth funding flowed to communities in 2001 for projects marking a hundred years of federation, and hundreds of towns spent it on permanent public artworks about themselves. A great many of the country's mid-sized monuments date from that single year, which is why so much Australian civic sculpture appears to have been installed simultaneously – because it was.

Wheat is a harder subject than it sounds. A single head of wheat is a slender, subtle thing with the awns fanning out from the grain, and at scale it can easily read as an abstract spike. Getting it to be recognisably wheat requires the awns to be right, which is largely what the sculpture is.

Cecil Newton Park sits on Midlands Road in the middle of town, and the Shire of Mingenew continues to promote the sculpture, including on its 2025 visitor map. In a district where the grain terminal is the largest structure for a considerable distance, a monument to the crop is not decoration.