This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 24.0065° S, 151.3357° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
A pair of oversized hands at a highway service centre, which is an unusual and slightly ambiguous subject.
The sculptures stand at the Benaraby Travel Centre on the Bruce Highway south of Gladstone, and Ampol confirms the centre operating twenty-four hours at 48813 Bruce Highway, with object-specific travel photography documenting the hands.
Hands are a rare subject in this catalogue and a hard one to read without a plaque. A single hand can be a greeting, a stop signal, a helping gesture or, in the case of the Big Hand at Alice Springs, a pun about second-hand goods. A pair of them at a roadhouse could be any of those – most plausibly a welcome, which is what a service centre wants to convey to a driver who has been on the Bruce for hours.
Without a source, the record does not assign a meaning.
The siting is the most reliable roadside position there is. A twenty-four-hour travel centre on the Bruce Highway between Gladstone and Rockhampton catches essentially every vehicle on the coastal run, and the drivers stopping are already out of the car with time to look at something.
The Bruce Highway is well represented in this collection – the mango man at Mutarnee, the frog at Plainland, the crocodile-in-a-boat at St Lawrence, the giraffe at Bororen, the magpie nest at Miriam Vale – and the hands belong to that same long ribbon of roadside objects.
The maker, a measured size and the year it went up are absent from every source located.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
A classic roadside Big Thing beside a major highway service centre. Object-specific travel photography documents the hands, and Ampol confirms the Benaraby Travel Centre is currently operating 24 hours at the same 48813 Bruce Highway site.
ACCESS
Navigate to Ampol Foodary Benaraby Travel Centre, 48813 Bruce Highway. Use the service-centre access and parking; do not stop on the Bruce Highway to photograph the sculptures.
