This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 34.7729° S, 149.6916° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
He is a portrait of a real sheep. Rambo was a stud ram at Bullamallita, a property near Goulburn, and the fifteen-metre concrete-and-steel merino is a life-like model of him rather than a generic sheep.
NSW Government records the structure as three storeys, 15.2 metres high and 18 metres long, built in 1985 to celebrate the fine-wool industry of Goulburn and the surrounding district.
He was the first of three. The brothers Attila and Louis Mokany, whose parents migrated from Hungary in the 1950s, built the Big Merino, then the Big Prawn at Ballina, then the Big Oyster at Taree in 1990 – a single family responsible for three of the best-known objects in the country.
The specificity is what separates this from most oversized livestock. It is a monument to an individual animal from a named property, in the way a racehorse gets a statue, and the fine-wool industry did treat elite stud rams as individuals worth extraordinary money.
The interior holds a wool exhibition and a gift shop stocking lightweight wool garments, merino and possum merino knitwear, knitting yarn, Australian-made sheepskins, lanolin products and souvenirs, regarded as one of the better wool retailers of its kind.
The sheep has also moved. He was relocated in 2007 when the Hume Highway bypass took the traffic away – an enormous exercise, and one of very few Big Things ever picked up and carried intact to a new site.
With the Big Banana and the Big Pineapple, Rambo is one of the three objects most Australians can name.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
