This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 23.5234° S, 148.1564° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Twenty-five metres of easel holding a reproduction of Van Gogh's Sunflowers, in a central Queensland mining and farming town.
The connection is sunflowers. The Central Highlands grow them commercially, and the crop is a genuine part of the district's agriculture alongside cotton, sorghum and grain – so a painting of sunflowers is a less arbitrary choice than it first appears.
The easel belongs to a set. Several giant Van Gogh easels exist around the world, built to a Canadian design first raised at Altona in Manitoba in 1998, with others in New Zealand, South Africa and the United States. Emerald's is part of that international series rather than a local invention, which makes it one of the very few objects in this catalogue with siblings on other continents.
That also makes it an outlier in another way. The Australian tradition is emphatically local – a fruit that grows here, an animal that lives here, a business that needs a sign. A franchised replica of a Dutch painting on a Canadian-designed structure is a different species of object entirely, closer to a shared civic gesture than to roadside advertising.
At twenty-five metres it is also among the tallest things in this collection, taller than the Goulburn merino and the Barellan racquet by a wide margin.
Emerald sits on the Nogoa River in the Bowen Basin, a coal and agriculture centre and the regional hub for a large area of central Queensland.
No record survives of an attribution, the material used or the installation date.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
