The Big Fishing Reel

What happened to the building is easier to trace than what happened to the reel. The premises at 175 Brisbane Road are now occupied by Gympie Pool World, whose own website still describes the address as the old Fisherman Warehouse building – a business identifying itself by the ghost of the one before it. That is a small, ordinary piece of evidence about how long a landmark keeps working after it has gone: the reel is not there, the tackle shop is not there, and the address is still explained by reference to both.

Roof-mounted trade signs of this kind were once common along Queensland's highway towns and have been quietly vanishing for two decades. They tend to go not through any decision about the object but through a change of tenancy, a re-roofing, an insurance assessment or a council signage rule. The reel's removal has no recorded reason, and most likely never had a dramatic one.

Gympie sits on the Mary River, north of the Sunshine Coast, and the Bruce Highway once ran straight through it before the bypass opened. A business on Brisbane Road in the years the traffic still came through had every reason to put something large on the roof.