This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
26.57434° S, 148.80041° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
A full-scale drilling rig with a forty-metre tower, kept because the industry started here.
Roma is where Australian commercial natural gas began. Drillers looking for water in 1900 struck gas instead, and by 1906 the town was briefly lighting its streets with it – the first place in the country to use natural gas that way, though the supply ran out within days. Commercial production followed decades later, and the Surat Basin around Roma has been a gas province ever since, now dominated by coal seam gas.
The Big Rig preserves that. A full-scale rig is not an enlargement of anything; it is the real equipment at its real size, in the same category as the Glenden mining bucket and the Ouyen mallee stump – objects that qualify as Big Things because the working article was already enormous.
Forty metres also makes the tower one of the tallest structures in this catalogue, well above the Emerald easel and the Barangaroo fishing floats.
It incorporates the Roma Visitor Information Centre, which puts it with the Gayndah orange in the small group of objects that house a civic function rather than merely standing beside one – and guarantees the maintenance that goes with it.
Roma's other entry here is considerably humbler: the oversized bolt and nut outside a fastener business, serving the machinery this district runs on.
The site is actively promoted as a major regional attraction, with a night show and interpretive displays about the drilling history.
Nothing available settles when the rig was retired or where it originally worked.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
The Big Rig also incorporates the Roma Visitor Information Centre and is actively promoted as a major regional attraction.
ACCESS
The Big Rig is beside the Roma Information Centre visitor precinct. Navigate to the independently mapped Information Centre and continue roughly 45 metres on foot within the attraction grounds.
