The Big Question Mark

This one did not. It was retained afterwards as the programme's first permanent legacy work, and it now stands in Lloyd Mann Gardens among a small group of large-scale public artworks in the town park.

The subject rewards the decision. Most public sculpture makes a statement – a founder, an industry, an animal, a product. A question mark makes none. It is a punctuation mark standing in a park, meaning whatever the person looking at it decides, and it works precisely because a town that grows sugar cane had no obvious reason to build one. There is no cane, no farmer, no crushing mill in it anywhere.

That is a braver choice than a Big Cane Stalk would have been, and a more interesting one. The Burdekin's identity is not in doubt, and Home Hill chose to spend its first permanent artwork on something open-ended instead of something explanatory.

Its size, its maker and its materials all sit outside the written record – a genuine gap for a work with a documented origin in a named programme, and one a local enquiry would likely close quickly.