This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 27.7349° S, 153.2261° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Mounted high above the pie shop, on the busiest stretch of road in Queensland.
Yatala Pies has been a Pacific Highway institution since long before the highway became a motorway, and the giant pie dates from the late 1970s. The site sits between Brisbane and the Gold Coast, on a route now carrying enormous traffic volumes, and the pie is how generations of drivers have known where to stop.
Highway food landmarks are their own species. The object is not advertising a district's produce or a town's history; it is a signal to a driver at speed that food exists here, and it has to work in about two seconds. Height solves that, which is why the pie is above the building rather than beside it – the same reasoning as the Miriam Vale crab and the Taree oyster.
A pie is also the correct Australian roadside food to enlarge. Not a burger or a hot dog: the meat pie is the thing sold at every service station, footy ground and bakery in the country, eaten standing up, and it carries a national familiarity nothing else on a highway menu does.
The shape is a modest design problem. A pie is a low cylinder with a crimped edge – readable from below, less so in profile – which is presumably why the object is mounted where it is seen from underneath, at the angle a driver actually has.
A late-1970s date makes it a contemporary of the Beerwah mower and the Miriam Vale crab, from the peak decade of Australian roadside building.
The maker's identity and the dimensions go undocumented.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
