This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 32.8383° S, 151.6894° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Most towns commemorate what they are proud of. Hexham built a monument to its worst feature.
The Hexham Grey is a saltmarsh mosquito with a formidable local reputation – large, aggressive and abundant in the wetlands around the town, and long treated in the Hunter as a regional affliction with a name. The Hexham Bowling Club has always used it as its symbol, which is already a good joke. In 1994 the club made it three and a half metres tall.
Ossie the Mozzie cost $17,200 to build and was modelled, wonderfully, on a giant chicken that a Toyota dealership had been using – one Big Thing reverse-engineered from another. The then Lord Mayor of Newcastle, Councillor John McNaughton, officially unveiled him on 10 March 1994.
He has had a hard three decades. The club records plastic surgery in 2004–05 and again in 2008 after damage from the weather and, fittingly, from other insects. In 2010 the Roads and Maritime Service required him to be shifted back four metres to allow the widening of the Pacific Highway, and he was given some animation in the process.
His coming of age was celebrated properly. Seventy children from Tarro Public School performed a song written about him, brought a pass-the-parcel they had made, and produced artwork, posters, cartoons and poems; a teacher made a cake with three-dimensional Ossies on it.
A town that gets a school choir to sing to a giant mosquito has understood something about Big Things that a lot of tourism boards have not.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Ossie the Mozzie is a giant mosquito sculpture, about 3.5 metres high, that stands as the roadside mascot of Hexham Bowling Club. It represents the Hexham Grey, a mosquito species notorious in the local area.
ACCESS
Navigate to Hexham Bowling Club at 290 Old Maitland Road. The club states that it has plenty of parking; use the club car park and view Ossie from within the property rather than stopping on Old Maitland Road.
