The Big-Eyed Scad

That origin puts it with a small group of objects in this catalogue that came from the same event – the dolphin fish at Tooradin on Western Port is the other. Large sculptures made for a two-week international sporting event have to go somewhere afterwards, and the ones that survive get distributed to towns willing to take them.

The distribution is what makes it odd. Tooradin at least is a fishing village on tidal water. Edenhope is in the western Wimmera, on Lake Wallace, a long way inland in sheep and cropping country. A tropical schooling marine fish there has no local logic at all, and the sculpture exists purely because a town said yes when the Games organisers were finding homes for things.

The big-eyed scad itself is a real and unglamorous fish – a schooling species of tropical and subtropical waters, caught commercially, mostly used as bait and food fish, and chosen for the Games display presumably for its enormous eye, which is genuinely striking and reads well at scale.

Lions Park is public ground, free and open, which is the right home for an object with no admission and no story.

The measurements remain blank.