The Big Lungfish

The treatment is the point. Rather than a smooth, solid fish, Olsen built an open, expressive, almost skeletal form, so the sculpture reads as a diagram of an animal as much as a portrait of one – appropriate for a creature whose interest is precisely that it is a living relic. It sits at Riverside Parklands on Quay Street, alongside the river the fish actually inhabits.

That combination – a nationally significant artist, a fish that matters scientifically, and a riverbank site that is genuinely the animal's home – puts it at the far artistic end of the Big Things spectrum. The council itself treats it as public art, using it to illustrate its public art master plan discussions rather than filing it under tourism novelties.

It is worth walking around rather than photographing from one side. The open metalwork changes considerably depending on where you stand.

There is a further reason the subject matters here. The Queensland lungfish is a protected species with a very restricted natural range, and the health of the Burnett system is directly bound up with its survival – a river that has been dammed, drought-stricken and flooded repeatedly within living memory. A sculpture of the animal on the bank of that river is quietly making an argument about what the water is for.

Olsen is best known as a painter of Australian landscape and its living systems, and the same preoccupation is visible here in three dimensions: not the fish as a specimen, but the fish as an expression of the water it comes from.