This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 32.7486° S, 148.6488° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
An empty hat, in a park named after the man who would have worn it.
NSW Government confirms the Big Hat at Banjo Paterson Bush Park, 47 Forbes Street, Yeoval, styled after the kind of hat associated with Paterson.
Andrew Barton Paterson was born in 1864 at Narrambla near Orange and spent his early childhood at Illalong, but Yeoval claims him too – his family had ties to the district and the town has built its identity around the connection. He wrote The Man from Snowy River, Clancy of the Overflow and Waltzing Matilda, and no other Australian writer is so thoroughly attached to a physical landscape.
A hat with nobody in it is a better monument than a statue would have been. Paterson's poems are full of men who are absent – Clancy gone droving, the man from Snowy River riding out of sight – and the whole bush-legend tradition is about figures you are told about rather than shown. An empty hat is exactly that idea in fibreglass.
Whether that reading was intended is not recorded. It may simply have been the cheapest recognisable object.
This is the second Paterson artefact in the catalogue, alongside Clancy the Big Dog at Kirwan, whose name comes from the same source without the town connection.
The hat's maker, dimensions, materials and installation date are all unrecorded.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
