The Big Red Elephant

The colour finishes the job. Red is not a plausible elephant, so the sculpture declares itself a sign rather than a representation, and the Red Elephant commercial complex takes its name and identity from it.

That is a small but real category in this catalogue: objects that are memorable because they are wrong. Most Big Things are accurate representations at absurd scale – a real fruit, a real animal, correctly coloured. A red elephant at correct scale inverts both variables at once.

There is no local elephant connection whatsoever, and the sources offer no origin story. Like the sphinx at North Geelong and the Dutch windmill at Coffs Harbour, it belongs to the imported-motif branch of the tradition, where the point is simply to be unmissable and unlike anything else on the road.

Plainland sits in the Lockyer Valley between Ipswich and Toowoomba, on the highway through some of the most intensively farmed vegetable country in Australia – which makes the absence of a produce-themed landmark here mildly conspicuous.

The unanswered questions are the material used, the year it went up and a named maker.