This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
26.67194° S, 152.98957° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Everybody drives to Woombye for the pineapple. Beside it, less remarked upon, stands a giant macadamia nut.
It was built in 1978, according to the Big Things Gazetteer record – a year after the Big Pineapple opened next door, and part of the same wave of Sunshine Coast agricultural tourism that made this stretch of hinterland one of the most concentrated Big Thing precincts in the country.
The subject deserves more attention than it gets. The macadamia is the only significant food crop native to Australia to have become a major international commodity. It grows wild in the rainforest of south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales, was taken to Hawaii in the nineteenth century, and was commercialised there before Australia caught up – so most of the world met it as a Hawaiian product. A giant macadamia in Queensland is quietly making a point about where the tree actually comes from.
The nut has outlived the era that produced it. The precinct around it has changed hands and purposes repeatedly, and the structure is now associated with the TreeTop Challenge, the high-ropes course operating on the site, rather than with a macadamia plantation tour.
It remains visible as part of the Woombye attraction precinct, which is a modest survival for an object nearly fifty years old in a place that has reinvented itself several times over.
Who built it, and what it is made from, are not recorded.
Its survival owes something to sitting beside a more famous neighbour. Objects that stand alone are removed when a site changes hands; one that forms part of a recognised precinct tends to be left in place, because taking it away would visibly subtract from the group.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
The structure remains current and is visible as part of the Woombye attraction precinct.
ACCESS
The Big Macadamia is independently mapped within the Big Pineapple attraction precinct near TreeTop Challenge. For vehicle arrival, navigate to The Big Pineapple at 76 Nambour Connection Road and use the operator’s free visitor parking; the mapped visitor-site arrival is about 190 metres southeast of the Big Macadamia.
