Big Frogs – Territory Wildlife Park

Frogs are an excellent subject for the Top End and a better one than most people realise. The wet season here produces genuinely spectacular amphibian activity – green tree frogs on every window, the noise from a filled billabong audible at a distance, species emerging from months buried in dry ground the moment the rain arrives. A child visiting a Territory wildlife park in February will have encountered more frogs in a week than a southern visitor sees in a decade.

The Territory Wildlife Park itself is a substantial operation: a large bushland site south of Darwin displaying only Northern Territory species, with walk-through aviaries, an aquarium and a monsoon forest walk. Sculptures there sit in an interpretive context rather than a purely decorative one.

Bright colour is a defensible choice even though most Australian frogs are green or brown. It reads at distance, it signals the object is for children, and there are genuinely vivid frogs in the world even if not in this park.

The dimensions, its age and the hand behind it were never written down.