Big Lizzie

Red Cliffs, Victoria, Australia

Roadside giants

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Current

Checked by Project Big Things · Aug 2026

This Big Thing is recorded as still being here.

A massive 45-tonne prime-mover tractor built by Frank Bottrill in 1915 and used to clear land for the Red Cliffs soldier settlement.

30 m walk
P
Parking
at the arrival point

Private to your Passport.

PLAN YOUR VISIT

Recommended arrival available

Other · 30 m walk

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

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Big Lizzie

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

34.30798° S, 142.18681° E

FIELD GUIDE

The story

Big Lizzie is not a sculpture of anything. She is the machine herself, forty-five tonnes of her, sitting in Barclay Square exactly as she was built in 1915.

Frank Bottrill made her, and the problem he was solving was mud. Conventional wheels bogged in the soft country of the Mallee and the Riverland, so Bottrill devised a system of enormous wheels fitted with pivoting shoes that laid down their own track as they turned – a solution to the same problem that produced the tank in the same decade, arrived at independently, in Victoria, for agriculture.

She was employed by the government to clear land at the Red Cliffs soldier settlement, the scheme that put returned servicemen from the First World War onto irrigation blocks after 1918. She virtually cleared all of Red Cliffs, at a rate of up to fifty acres in a day. The town that exists here exists substantially because of what this machine did to the scrub.

That makes her an unusual case, and arguably the most historically significant object the Big Things tradition has absorbed. Almost everything else is a representation – fibreglass fruit standing for a crop, a statue standing for an industry. Big Lizzie is the industry. Nothing is being depicted, exaggerated or approximated.

She is enormous by any standard, which is why she reads as a Big Thing at all, and she has become Red Cliffs' principal landmark.

Her journey to her final resting place is itself recorded in the local history, which is fitting for a machine whose entire working life was about moving slowly across difficult ground.

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PRACTICAL

Plan your stop

WHAT TO EXPECT

Big Lizzie is a genuine oversized historic machine rather than a replica, and remains proudly displayed as one of Red Cliffs’ principal landmarks.

ACCESS

Big Lizzie is displayed in public Barclay Square at Red Cliffs. Navigate to the council-published park location and use lawful surrounding access; the direct destination represents the park rather than a specific parking bay.

COMMUNITY

Visitor Log

WHAT'S NEXT

Find another Big Thing nearby

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Current

The Big Orange

Mourquong, New South Wales

A large smiling orange at the entrance to Orange World, a working citrus attraction at Mourquong just across the NSW border from Mildura.

Roadside giants

19 km away

TRANSPARENCY

Sources & research

Mildura Rural City Council – Red Cliffs Historical Walk

Mildura Rural City Council · recorded 2026-08-22

Government

Monument Australia – Big Lizzie

Monument Australia · recorded 2026-08-22

Historical archive

Visit Mildura – Red Cliffs

Visit Mildura · recorded 2026-08-22

Tourism

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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