This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 26.3981° S, 153.0604° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
A giant pelican on the Noosa River foreshore, in the Quota Park precinct, and a long-running landmark in a place that has changed enormously around it.
Noosa is now one of the most expensive and heavily visited stretches of the Queensland coast. Noosaville, on the river rather than the surf, was for a long time the quieter, more domestic half – caravan parks, boat hire, families on the grass. A pelican beside the water belongs to that earlier version of the place, and its survival through decades of redevelopment is the most interesting thing about it.
Pelicans are also genuinely present. Australian pelicans work the Noosa River in numbers, loafing on the pontoons and following boats, and they are among the few large wild birds most Australians can identify without effort. A monument to them is a monument to something visible from the same spot.
They are remarkable animals – the longest bill of any bird, a pouch that holds more than the stomach does, and a habit of appearing on inland lakes within days of them filling, having flown hundreds of kilometres to breeding grounds that exist only in wet years.
This catalogue holds a second pelican at Loxton on the Murray, which began as a parade float. Together they mark the bird's range: the coastal estuary and the inland river.
Quota Park is public foreshore, so unlike most objects in this collection the pelican stands on ground nobody has to be a customer to use.
The measurements and the year it went up were never written down.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
