This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 28.8639° S, 153.5326° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Ballina nearly demolished its prawn, and for a while a prawnless Ballina looked like a real possibility.
The Big Prawn went up in 1989 – nine metres high, thirty-five tonnes, on River Street, the main road into town. Twenty years later it was, in the tourism board's own phrase, looking a bit long in the pincers. The town argued fiercely about what to do with it and demolition was seriously discussed.
What saved it was a hardware store. The business next door redeveloped the site and took the prawn on as part of the project, funding a major restoration, and the landmark was unveiled again in 2013.
The restoration corrected something that had bothered people for twenty-four years. The original prawn had no tail. The 2013 version has one – a genuinely substantial addition that changed the silhouette of one of the best-known Big Things in Australia, and a rare case of an object being improved rather than merely repaired.
Ballina sits at the mouth of the Richmond River and has a real prawning fleet, so the subject is honest. But the prawn's significance now exceeds its industry: it is one of the most photographed objects on the north coast, and as Discover Ballina puts it, it is hard to imagine the town without it.
That sentence is the whole argument for keeping these things. In 2009 the prawn was an ageing liability that a council could reasonably have removed. Fifteen years on it is inseparable from the town's identity, and nobody would now suggest touching it.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
NSW Government and current Discover Ballina material confirm the Big Prawn at 507 River Street in West Ballina, beside the hardware-store precinct that helped save and restore it.
ACCESS
Navigate to the commercial precinct at 507 River Street and use marked vehicle access/parking. Do not stop on River Street for photographs.
