This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
45.03541° S, 169.19726° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Four pieces of fruit, nearly eight metres high, standing at the entrance to a town that lost its old centre under a lake.
The Cromwell Big Fruit was built in 1989 and shows an apricot, an apple, a pear and a nectarine – the stone and pip fruit that Central Otago grows better than almost anywhere, in a basin of hot dry summers and hard frosts that produces exceptional apricots in particular. Central Otago District Council calls the reserve home to probably one of the most photographed objects in New Zealand, which is a large claim and not obviously wrong.
The timing carries something the sculpture does not announce. Cromwell's historic centre and a great deal of its best orchard land were flooded in the 1990s by the filling of Lake Dunstan behind the Clyde Dam, and the town was substantially rebuilt. The orchards that survived, and the ones re-established on higher ground, are what the fruit celebrates. Several of the district's growing families lost their original blocks to the water – the Jackson orchard, for instance, began on land first settled in 1866 and now under Lake Dunstan.
A monument to fruit built at the end of that decade is doing more than advertising produce. It is a statement that the industry continued.
Four separate fruits rather than one is also the right decision. A single giant apricot would claim a monoculture; the group says a district with a range, which is what Central Otago actually is.
The four fruits are also, quietly, a calendar. Cherries and apricots come first, then nectarines, then apples – so the sculpture maps a whole Central Otago season in the order the orchards pick it.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
The Big Fruit sculpture depicts an apricot, apple, pear and nectarine at Cromwell's dedicated Big Fruit Reserve, maintained by Central Otago District Council with an adjacent visitor carpark.
ACCESS
The Big Fruit sculpture is at Big Fruit Reserve beside Murray Terrace in Cromwell. The sculpture point is map-checked from independent geotagged imagery and corroborating location evidence, and the reserve's dedicated car park (17A Murray Terrace) is independently confirmed by two directories as sitting right beside the shops and the sculpture, ~35m away. Direct navigation to this car park is safe and appropriate.
