This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
35.00248° S, 148.11055° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
A giant koala at a highway food stop, a short distance from one of the most famous roadside monuments in Australia.
The sculpture stands at the Oliver's Real Food site on Annie Pyers Drive at Gundagai, confirmed by current specialist mapping and a March 2026 geotagged photograph, with the food stop active.
Its near neighbour is the point of interest. The Dog on the Tuckerbox, five miles from Gundagai, was unveiled in 1932 and is among the oldest and best-known roadside monuments in the country – a bronze dog on a plinth commemorating a bullock-driver's yarn and a poem, and a fixture of the Hume Highway experience for nearly a century.
A giant koala arriving beside that is competing with something that has had ninety years to become sacred. It is a fair illustration of how the roadside monument tradition layers: an interwar civic memorial, then a late-twentieth-century service centre, then a contemporary fast-food stop, each adding an object to the same stretch of road.
Koalas do occur in the region, though populations across New South Wales have declined severely enough for the species to be listed as endangered in the state.
The Hume is the busiest interurban corridor in Australia, and Gundagai's cluster of stopping places has always depended on that. An object at a food stop there has a very large and very captive audience.
The catalogue cannot supply a date, an attribution and the height.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Current specialist mapping and a March 2026 geotagged photograph confirm the Big Koala at the Oliver's Real Food site on Annie Pyers Drive. The adjacent food stop remains active with customer parking.
ACCESS
The Big Koala stands within the Oliver’s Real Food Gundagai stopping precinct at 31 Annie Pyers Drive. Navigate to the operating venue and use its customer parking; do not stop on the highway approaches for photographs.
