This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
30.21870° S, 151.67281° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
The Big Lamb is standing on a potato, which is the least subtle way imaginable of naming a district's two industries at once.
Guyra put it up in 1988 – a Poll Dorset sheep above a potato plant, on the New England Highway. The pairing was not arbitrary. Two years earlier, in 1986, Royce Newbury and Frank Presnell of the Guyra Rotary Club, together with Joyce Sanders, had decided that the town's major products should be promoted with a week-long festival each January, and the first Guyra Lamb and Potato Festival was held in Rotary Park in January 1987. The sculpture followed the festival rather than the other way round.
That sequence is worth noticing. Usually the monument comes first and the town hopes an occasion grows around it. Here a community invented the event first, found it worked, and then built the monument to it – which may be why both have lasted. A plaque was added in 2003 recognising the founders' vision.
Guyra is the highest town in the New England High Country at 1,330 metres, with cold winters and reliable snowfalls, and a population just over two thousand. Altitude is the reason the district grows what it does: cool-climate potatoes and heavy-fleeced prime lamb both do well up here in ways they would not on the coast.
The monument sits in the Monument Australia register, which places it among commemorative works rather than roadside novelties – a fair reading of an object that exists to honour a festival and the people who started it.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Destination NSW and current Armidale-region tourism material continue to promote the Big Lamb as a Guyra icon on the New England Highway. The monument is associated with Rotary Park and the long-running Lamb and Potato Festival.
ACCESS
The Big Lamb stands in Guyra’s Rotary Park precinct. Navigate to the mapped Rotary Park / Rest Area and walk roughly 50 metres to the monument; do not stop in the New England Highway traffic lane.
