This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 41.9434° S, 148.2143° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
The Pondering Frog was one woman's obsession, and she was entirely open about it.
Collette Dieren, the café's original owner, was thoroughly taken with frogs, and wanting to promote her business on the Tasman Highway she asked a local, Mark Trigg, to design something big. The result was installed to considerable fanfare in April 2023, next to the frog-shaped slide the café already had for children.
The operator now promotes it straightforwardly as Tasmania's biggest frog.
The economics behind it are unusually clear. The café sits at 16494 Tasman Highway, four hundred metres from the Coles Bay turn-off, and reckons around 300,000 visitors drive past each year – most of them heading for Freycinet and Wineglass Bay, one of the most visited places in the state. A business on that corner does not need to attract people to the region; it needs to convert a stream of traffic that is already going somewhere else. A giant green frog is a very direct way to do that.
The timing is notable too. April 2023 is recent, and the object was commissioned by a small independent café rather than a council or a chain – which is evidence that the tradition is still being fed by exactly the same impulse that produced it in the 1960s.
It is roughly two hours from either Hobart or Launceston, on the east coast run.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
The operator explicitly promotes “Tasmania’s Biggest frog” and directs visitors to see the Big Frog at its active Tasman Highway cafe. Contemporary specialist reporting dates the current giant frog installation to 2023.
ACCESS
The Big Frog is at The Pondering Frog, 16494 Tasman Highway near Bicheno. Navigate to the operating cafe/RV-stop site and use normal customer access and onsite parking; the stored point is site-level rather than a surveyed frog centroid.
