This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 32.8193° S, 151.4802° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Built to mark forty years of an aluminium smelter, which has since closed.
Chris Fussell's kookaburra – almost five metres, perched on a tree trunk – was erected in late 2009 in Col Brown Rotary Park to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Kurri Kurri's Hydro Aluminium. The smelter shut down in 2012, three years later, taking hundreds of jobs with it, and the site has since been remediated for redevelopment.
So the sculpture commemorates an anniversary of something that did not reach fifty. That is not unusual in this catalogue – the Woombye pineapple outlasted the Nambour cannery, the Home Hill cane cutters outlasted hand cutting – but the interval here is unusually short, and it makes the object a marker of the town's industrial period rather than a celebration of it.
Kookaburras run right through Kurri Kurri's identity. They appear in each of the sixty murals painted around the town, and a map from the visitor centre lets you find them all – so the sculpture is the three-dimensional anchor of a much larger painted programme.
The bird is well chosen for a place that needed something durable. Kookaburras are laughing kingfishers, loud at dawn and dusk, familiar to every Australian, and entirely indifferent to whether the local industry is doing well.
Kurri Kurri sits in the lower Hunter, a coalfields town before it was a smelter town, and now largely a commuter one.
The materials are not recorded here.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
