Big Roller – Burnie Pulp and Paper Trail

That legacy is the whole story of Burnie. Associated Pulp and Paper Mills operated here through most of the twentieth century, employing thousands, producing a very large share of Australia's fine paper, and defining everything about the town – its population, its port, its smell and eventually its decline. The mill's contraction from the 1990s onward reshaped the city as comprehensively as its establishment had.

A roller is the right relic. In a paper machine the rollers are what the wet web passes over and between – pressing, drying, calendering – and there are dozens of them in a single line. Displaying one is displaying the smallest comprehensible piece of a machine the size of a building.

It belongs with the honest objects in this catalogue, the ones that are the actual equipment rather than a representation: Big Lizzie at Red Cliffs, the turbine blade at Snowtown, Hannibal's Bucket at Nanango, the log at Campbell Town.

Burnie has since turned decisively toward its waterfront and toward art – the gateway poles, the sea creatures water sculpture, the giant freshwater crayfish, the pencils. The Big Roller is the piece that acknowledges what came before all of that.

Neither the sources nor the catalogue give the year and its proportions.