Big Pencils – Ridgley Primary School

School Big Things are a real and almost entirely unrecorded category. Primary schools across both countries have oversized objects at their gates – pencils, books, apples, mascots – usually made by a parent with a welder or funded by a fete, and virtually none appear in any register. That a council guide picked these up is unusual and useful.

The subject is well chosen for the audience. A pencil is the first tool a child is given, it is instantly recognisable in silhouette, and rendering it at several metres at the entrance to a school makes a clear statement about what happens inside.

Burnie has a second set of Big Pencils, on the roof of Complete Stationery in the CBD – a shop selling them and a school using them, in the same municipality, which is a pleasing accident.

Ridgley is a small settlement inland from Burnie in Tasmania's north-west, and the school is the centre of it.

Because the objects stand on school grounds, this record marks access as restricted, and firmly rather than formally: a primary school is not a visitor destination, and the entry exists to document the sculptures rather than to send anyone there.

There is no record of the decade it belongs to, any attribution or the dimensions.