This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 20.0461° S, 148.2284° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
In February 2014 the Big Mango vanished overnight, and the country briefly took it seriously.
Tourism Bowen tells the story straight: the ten-metre mango disappeared, made headline news across the globe, and was later revealed to be a stunt by the restaurant chain Nando's, promoting a new mango and lime sauce. Afterwards, in appreciation for the town's cooperation, Nando's donated a doppelganger – the six-metre Mini Mango, built to stand in for the original in Melbourne because the real one was too big to make the trip.
So Bowen now has two mangoes, one of which exists only because the first one was stolen as advertising.
It remains the most successful piece of theatre in the history of Australian Big Things, and it worked because people genuinely cared. The mango was erected on 25 May 2002 through a community campaign, not a company's marketing budget, and Tourism Bowen credits it – along with the mango mascot Kenny – with revitalising the local community and lifting tourism.
Bowen's claim to the fruit is real. The district is one of Australia's major mango-growing areas, and the Kensington Pride, the dominant Australian variety, is often called the Bowen mango after this town.
The ten-metre sculpture stands beside the visitor information centre and is straightforwardly a photo stop.
A community-funded object, stolen by a corporation, returned with a smaller free copy, is a sequence no other entry in this catalogue can match.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
A roadside photo stop with visitor-centre parking and facilities.
ACCESS
Navigate to Bowen’s Big Mango Visitor Information Centre on the Bruce Highway. Bowen Tourism currently confirms free parking and easy access for the Big Mango stop. The stored Big Mango site is independently mapped at essentially the same coordinate; use the formed visitor-centre parking on arrival rather than treating the landmark point as a parking-bay centroid.
