The Big Shark

Mini-golf obstacles are a legitimate and almost entirely undocumented branch of the oversized-object tradition. Courses across both countries are built from giant animals, windmills, castles and pirate ships, all made at the same scale and with the same materials as roadside Big Things, and virtually none of them are ever recorded – because they sit inside a paid attraction rather than beside a road. This catalogue holds very few, and they are consistently the hardest to verify.

The pirate theme explains the shark's presence more than the koala park does. A great white has no relationship to a Victorian wildlife park, but it has an obvious one to a pirate course, where the design logic is adventure rather than accuracy.

Sharks are also a specifically Australian anxiety, and a great white in Western Port at Grantville is at least geographically plausible – the species is genuinely present in Victorian waters, and Bass Strait is not a gentle place.

Maru sits on the Bass Highway near the Phillip Island turnoff, on the road that also carries the Newhaven Big Wave, so the two objects share a stretch of traffic heading to the same destination.

Access is restricted because the shark is inside a paid course within a commercial venue.

The shark's maker, dimensions and installation date are not recorded.