Big Kiwi – Te Poi

Te Poi, Waikato, New Zealand

Roadside giants

✓

Current

Confirmed by travellers · Aug 2026

This Big Thing is recorded as still being here.

A large concrete kiwi by Gordon Rose at the Te Poi Country Tavern / Big Cow complex.

Venue entrance

Private to your Passport.

PLAN YOUR VISIT

Recommended arrival available

Attraction entrance

This takes you to the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.

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Big Kiwi – Te Poi

This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.

Site-level location · 37.8718° S, 175.8418° E

FIELD GUIDE

The story

The kiwi at Te Poi is being held up by a fence, which is a fittingly undignified position for the national bird.

It is concrete, like everything else Gordon Rose made for the tavern, and it is the odd one out in the group. The cow and calf are about dairy country, the burger is about the menu – but a kiwi is not a Waikato subject or a pub subject. It is simply the national symbol, rendered in concrete and stood outside a country hotel, which makes it the most straightforwardly patriotic object in the collection and the least explicable.

The growing pile is the real story here. What began with a six-metre cow in the mid-1990s accumulated over the years into a genuine assemblage: the cow, the calf, the hamburger, a golf ball, two big cream cans and, indoors, three moa. Rose kept going, and the pub kept finding room.

That is a rare thing in this tradition. Nearly every Big Thing is a single object, commissioned once and then maintained or neglected. Te Poi has an accumulation by one maker at one address over decades, which is closer to a folk-art environment than to roadside advertising – the same impulse that produces bottle houses and yard sculpture gardens, on a much larger scale.

Specialist documentation records the kiwi propped against its fence, and current listings confirm the tavern is operating.

When the kiwi was made, and how large it is, are not recorded.

Concrete is also why the collection has survived. Fibreglass from the mid-1990s would be chalking and cracking by now; concrete simply stains and stays, which is why a fence is enough to keep a kiwi upright.

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PRACTICAL

Plan your stop

WHAT TO EXPECT

Specialist public-art documentation identifies the concrete kiwi as part of the same group of oversized sculptures as the six-metre Big Cow. Current 2026 listings confirm the tavern remains active.

ACCESS

Route to Te Poi Country Tavern at 11 Te Poi Road, the current operating hospitality site hosting the outdoor Big Things. Use the tavern as the vehicle destination; the stored landmark geometry is not a parking instruction.

COMMUNITY

Visitor Log

WHAT'S NEXT

Find another Big Thing nearby

✓

Current

Big Cow and Calf – Te Poi

Te Poi, Waikato

A six-metre Friesian cow and companion calf outside Te Poi Country Tavern.

Roadside giants

0.0 km away

✓ Recommended arrival recorded

TRANSPARENCY

Sources & research

Localista – Te Poi Country Tavern

Localista · recorded 2026-08-23

Current 2026 business listing confirms the host site remains operating.

Other

OpenStreetMap/Mapcarta – Te Poi Tavern

OpenStreetMap via Mapcarta · recorded 2026-08-23

Te Poi Tavern building mapped at -37.87178, 175.84184; used as site-level geometry for the hosted Big Things cluster, not as individual exact sculpture positions.

Other

Public Art Around The World – Big Kiwi Te Poi

Public Art Around The World · recorded 2026-08-23

Specialist record documents concrete kiwi and associated Big Cow complex.

Community

What we're still checking

Open-licence image search completed 24 August 2026. No defensible reusable image with file-level commercial-use provenance was verified in the completed Commons, government/open-licence and archival/open-collection sweep.

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