A 6.5-metre fibreglass Murray cod at Redmond Park, created to celebrate the local Lions Club’s 50th anniversary.
Before you stop
Use the formal parking/rest area rather than stopping beside the sculpture.
Parking on site
P
Parking
onsite
PRACTICAL
Plan your stop
WHAT TO EXPECT
The Big Murray Cod is a 6.5-metre fibreglass sculpture at Redmond Park in Goondiwindi, promoted today as a local landmark and a stop on the town's art trail.
ACCESS
Navigate to Redmond Park on Anderson Street and use the park parking rather than stopping beside the sculpture. Current tourism confirms parking, toilets, picnic facilities and traveller amenities.
Private to your Passport.
PLAN YOUR VISIT
Recommended arrival available
Onsite parking
This takes you to the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
A free Explorer account reveals the exact recommended arrival point.
This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 28.5525° S, 150.3208° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
The Big Murray Cod at Goondiwindi exists because a Lions Club member went on holiday to New Zealand and came home with an idea.
That member was Peter Smith. He had seen a statue on his trip a few years earlier, and when the Goondiwindi Lions Club was looking for something to mark its fiftieth anniversary he proposed the town do something similar at scale. The result, built by Natureworks and installed in 2015, is a 6.5-metre fibreglass Murray cod standing in Redmond Park.
The species choice is not decorative. The Murray cod is Australia's largest freshwater fish and the emblematic catch of the Murray-Darling system, and Goondiwindi sits on the Macintyre River within it. A town that fishes for cod put up a cod.
The anniversary framing is worth pausing on too, because it explains a whole category of Australian Big Things. A great many were not commissioned by councils or tourism boards but by service clubs – Lions, Apex, Rotary – looking for a lasting, visible project to mark a milestone. It is a very particular kind of civic gift: something large, useless in the best sense, and unmistakably from the club to the town.
The cod is now promoted as a local landmark and a stop on Goondiwindi's art trail, which is the usual second life of these objects. Built as an anniversary present, it ends up as a destination.
The species itself gives the monument some weight it might not otherwise carry. Murray cod grow slowly, live for decades and were historically caught at sizes – well over a metre, and many tens of kilograms – that are now rare. The population declined severely through the twentieth century under fishing pressure, river regulation and habitat loss, and the fish is now the subject of stocking programs and tight catch rules across the basin.
So a 6.5-metre cod in a park is not only a boast about local fishing. It is a representation of an animal at a size the river used to produce routinely and mostly no longer does.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
