The Big Little Man

Canberra City, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

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Public art

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Current

Checked by Project Big Things · Aug 2026

This Big Thing is recorded as still being here.

A whimsical bronze figure in Petrie Plaza that deliberately plays with exaggerated scale.

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The Big Little Man

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35.27958° S, 149.13168° E

FIELD GUIDE

The story

He appears both larger and smaller than life at the same time, which is a genuinely odd thing to achieve and the reason for the name.

Dean Bowen's Big Little Man stands in Petrie Plaza, and artsACT describes exactly that doubled effect. The figure is monumental in bearing and modest in stature – proportioned so that it reads as a giant and as a small person depending on where you are standing and what is behind it.

Bowen's method explains it. He is primarily a printmaker, and his bronzes carry that sensibility: simplified, slightly lumpy figures with oversized heads and small bodies, animated by what artsACT calls a whimsical naivety intended to touch the child in people of all ages. Childlike proportions at adult scale produce exactly this ambiguity.

It was his first public work in Canberra, from 2009, and he made a second in 2011 – Lady With Flowers, out at Gungahlin on Flemington Road near the light rail. The register imagines her taking a tram into the city to meet him, which the line's later opening made unexpectedly literal.

Petrie Plaza is the centre of Canberra's city retail area and now also holds Big Swoop, the 2.4-metre magpie stealing a chip unveiled in 2022. So the plaza carries a small bronze man of ambiguous size and an enormous fibreglass bird, about twenty metres apart.

He remains on the ACT Government's current Canberra City Public Art Walking Trail.

The measurements are simply not known.

PRACTICAL

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WHAT TO EXPECT

artsACT describes Dean Bowen’s sculpture as appearing both larger and smaller than life and confirms its Petrie Plaza location. It remains part of the ACT Government’s current Canberra City Public Art Walking Trail.

ACCESS

Public pedestrian artwork in Petrie Plaza, Civic. Approach on foot; no attraction-specific vehicle destination is required.

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