Big Golf Ball – Darwin Golf Club

Adding the tee is what lifts it. A giant golf ball on its own is a white sphere – this catalogue has now logged them at Palmerston North, Rotorua, Clayton South, Hervey Bay and Te Poi, and the form is close to exhausted. Mounting one on a tee gives the object a base, an orientation and an unmistakable second reading: the ball is not merely large, it is about to be hit.

It also solves a practical problem. A sphere needs a plinth or a cradle to sit on, and a tee is the only plinth that is also part of the subject.

Darwin Golf Club is a serious course rather than a novelty venue, and golf in the Top End is its own discipline – played early to avoid the heat, on couch grass, through a wet season that closes fairways for weeks.

Marrara is Darwin's sporting precinct, holding the stadium, the athletics centre and a cluster of clubs, so the ball sits among other people's facilities rather than alone on a highway.

Nothing found establishes any date at all, an attribution and its size.