Big Log – Campbell Town

Campbell Town, Tasmania, Australia

Landmarks and monuments

✓

Current

Checked by Project Big Things · Sep 2026

This Big Thing is recorded as still being here.

A famously oversized felled hardwood log displayed under shelter in Campbell Town.

Parking on site

Private to your Passport.

PLAN YOUR VISIT

Recommended arrival available

Onsite parking

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

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Big Log – Campbell Town

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

Site-level location · 41.9284° S, 147.4945° E

FIELD GUIDE

The story

The Big Log is not a sculpture of a log. It is a log.

A famously oversized felled hardwood log lies under shelter in Valentines Park in the middle of Campbell Town, and the shelter is the tell – nobody roofs a sculpture, but a piece of timber displayed as a specimen needs protection from rain if it is going to last.

That puts it in the small, honest category of Big Things that are the actual object rather than a representation, alongside Big Lizzie at Red Cliffs, the wind turbine blade at Snowtown and the Steiger Vortex guns at Charleville. Nothing is exaggerated. The tree really was that big.

Tasmania is the right place for such a display. The island grew, and largely cut, some of the tallest hardwood forest in the world, and the size of individual trees taken from it is genuinely difficult to convey in photographs. A single log at ground level, where people can put a hand on it, does what a photograph cannot.

Campbell Town is a Midland Highway town of around eight hundred people, established in 1826 as one of the four garrison towns linking Hobart and Launceston. Its earliest European settlement dates to about 1821, when the constable Thomas Kenton built a cottage here, with a causeway over the river by 1823 and an inn in 1824.

Northern Midlands Council records work on information signage for the log, so the interpretation is being maintained.

No answer exists for its age and the measurements.

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PRACTICAL

Plan your stop

WHAT TO EXPECT

Northern Midlands Council records work on information signage for the Big Log, and current locality material places The Log in Valentines Park in central Campbell Town.

ACCESS

The Big Log is in Valentines Park at 89 High Street, Campbell Town. The stored object point is a map-checked park-site reference rather than a claimed exact log centroid. Northern Midlands Council confirms Valentines Park on High Street, and current Council-hosted visitor information explicitly lists a carpark at the park. Navigate to the mapped Valentines Park destination at approximately -41.92843, 147.49449, use the lawful onsite/adjacent park parking on arrival and continue on foot; the destination point is not asserted to be a parking-bay centroid.

COMMUNITY

Visitor Log

WHAT'S NEXT

Find another Big Thing nearby

A giant trout sculpture in Bartholomew Park at Cressy, part of the town’s long-running “troutification” identity.

Roadside giants

44 km away

✓ Recommended arrival recorded

TRANSPARENCY

Sources & research

Campbell Town locality overview

Wikipedia · recorded 2026-08-22

Corroborates Valentines Park display; used alongside council evidence.

Community

Northern Midlands Council minutes – Big Log signage

Northern Midlands Council · recorded 2026-08-22

Council records research/update of Big Log signage.

Government

Spirit of Tasmania – Valentines Park, Campbell Town

Spirit of Tasmania / Northern Midlands Council · recorded 2026-09-11

Current listing hosted by Northern Midlands Council identifies Valentines Park as a visitor stop and explicitly lists a carpark among its facilities.

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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