The Big Mallee Root

That makes it one of a very small group here – objects that are the real thing at unusual size rather than a manufactured enlargement, alongside the Glenden mining bucket and the decommissioned equipment displays.

Mallee roots are the right emblem and a heavy one. Mallee eucalypts grow multiple thin stems from a massive underground lignotuber, an enormous woody swelling that stores energy and lets the plant regrow after fire. That structure is why the country is called the Mallee, and clearing it was the defining labour of settlement here – the stumps had to be grubbed out, one at a time, by hand and horse and later by machine, before wheat could be sown. Mallee rollers and stump-jump ploughs were invented for exactly this problem.

The roots were then burned as fuel. Mallee root was sold across Victoria as firewood for decades, prized because it burns hot and long.

So the object commemorates the thing that had to be destroyed to make the district, using one that survived. A community that puts the largest stump it can find on a plinth is telling that story precisely.

A date go undocumented.