Big Petition – East Melbourne

East Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Public art

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Checked by Project Big Things · Aug 2026

This Big Thing is recorded as still being here.

A 20-metre sculptural scroll commemorating the 1891 Monster Petition and the campaign for women’s suffrage in Victoria.

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Big Petition – East Melbourne

This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.

Site-level location · 37.8103° S, 144.9747° E

FIELD GUIDE

The story

A twenty-metre sculptural scroll outside Parliament, standing for a petition that was real and nearly as long.

The 1891 Monster Petition carried around 30,000 signatures of Victorian women demanding the vote. Collected door to door over about six weeks, it was pasted onto a roll of fabric-backed paper more than 260 metres long, wound onto a cardboard spindle, and carried into the Legislative Assembly. It survives in the Public Record Office Victoria and is one of the most affecting objects in Australian political history – page after page of ordinary handwriting.

The petition did not succeed. Victorian women did not get the vote until 1908, the last of the Australian colonies to grant it, seventeen years after they asked. The sculpture at Parliament Place was raised to mark the centenary of that eventual success.

What makes this a genuinely good monument is that it is a scaled representation of a specific surviving document rather than an allegorical figure. Suffrage memorials usually give you a bronze woman. This one gives you the paperwork – the unglamorous, patient, physical evidence of thousands of people signing their names.

It is also the only overtly political object in this catalogue. Everything else here commemorates produce, industry, wildlife or commerce. A twenty-metre scroll about the franchise is a Big Thing in form and a civic memorial in purpose, and it sits outside the building where the argument was actually had.

Any date at all, the person responsible and the material used go undocumented.

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PRACTICAL

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WHAT TO EXPECT

Current Melbourne visitor coverage describes the Big Petition as a permanent 20-metre sculpture at Parliament Place commemorating the centenary of women’s suffrage in Victoria.

ACCESS

Public-realm artwork near Parliament Place. Approach on foot from surrounding streets and public transport; no attraction-specific vehicle destination is required.

COMMUNITY

Visitor Log

WHAT'S NEXT

Find another Big Thing nearby

Current – limited access

The Giant Pocket Watch

Melbourne, Victoria

A two-tonne musical pocket-watch clock suspended beside the historic Shot Tower inside Melbourne Central.

Roadside giants

1.0 km away

TRANSPARENCY

Sources & research

realestate.com.au – Victoria’s Big Things

realestate.com.au · recorded 2026-08-23

Recent Victorian Big Things feature listing Big Petition at Burston Reserve / MacArthur Street.

News

What we're still checking

Open-licence image search completed 24 August 2026. No defensible reusable image with file-level commercial-use provenance was verified in the completed Commons, government/open-licence and archival/open-collection sweep.

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