The Big Shoe

Baxter, Victoria, Australia

Roadside giants

Current – limited access

Checked by Project Big Things · Sep 2026

This Big Thing is still here, but public access is limited. Check the access notes for details before visiting.

A giant shoe originally built for a Moomba parade and now displayed behind the fence at Youley Garden Supplies in Baxter.

Limited access
Check the access notes for details before visiting

Private to your Passport.

PLAN YOUR VISIT

No recommended arrival yet

We have not checked a recommended place to arrive or stop here yet.

This takes you to the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.

The Big Shoe

This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.

Approximate location · 38.203° S, 145.124° E

FIELD GUIDE

The story

The Bata Shoe Company built it for the Moomba parade, and it has been sitting behind a fence at a garden supplies yard ever since.

Bata was established in Czechoslovakia in 1894 and began manufacturing at Seaford in Victoria in 1961, later moving to Mornington. The company built the Big Shoe as a Moomba float for the Melbourne parade, stored it at Seaford, and when its useful life ended sold and donated it to Youley Garden Supplies.

It is now over sixty years old and looks it – the specialist account describes it fairly as an old shoe that has had better days. The colouring has changed at some point, presumably a freshening up; originally it was a mix of yellow and brown with white house tops.

House tops, because it is the shoe from the nursery rhyme. There was an old woman who lived in a shoe, and the float was built with a house on it accordingly.

July 2025 specialist documentation confirms it remains at Youley Garden Supplies, 169 Moorooduc Highway, and the business is independently confirmed at that address. The object sits behind a fence on private commercial property but is viewable from outside – which the record states clearly.

Parade floats that survive are a recurring category in this catalogue: the pelican at Loxton, the chook at Moonbi, the Games fish scattered across Victoria. All of them were built for a single afternoon and outlived it by decades.

This is the second nursery-rhyme Big Thing here, alongside the Carnarvon Humpty Dumpty on his cyclone-shelter tank.

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PRACTICAL

Plan your stop

WHAT TO EXPECT

Fresh July 2025 specialist documentation confirms the Big Shoe remains at Youley Garden Supplies, 169 Moorooduc Highway. The current business is independently confirmed at that address. The object is behind a fence on private commercial property but is viewable from outside.

ACCESS

The Big Shoe is behind the fence at the front of Youley Garden Supplies on Moorooduc Highway, Baxter. A July 2025 on-site Big Things report provides a mapped point for the shoe and confirms it is readily viewable from outside the property. The object point is now map-checked at approximate precision; no dedicated lawful parking/arrival point has been independently verified, so direct navigation remains withheld.

COMMUNITY

Visitor Log

WHAT'S NEXT

Find another Big Thing nearby

Current – limited access

Reflective Lullaby – Giant Gnome

Langwarrin, Victoria

Gregor Kregar’s monumental mirrored stainless-steel garden gnome, widely known as Frankie.

Public art

7.8 km away

✓ Recommended arrival recorded

TRANSPARENCY

Sources & research

The Big Shoe (Baxter)

Brown Signs · recorded 2026-09-11

Fresh July 2025 specialist confirmation; object behind fence at the front of Youley Garden Supplies and visible from outside. Source map directions resolve to -38.2027, 145.1236; used as an approximate map-checked object point.

Community

Youley Garden Supplies & Premix Concrete

Dun & Bradstreet · recorded 2026-08-22

Current business/address corroboration at 169 Moorooduc Highway.

Other

What we're still checking

Current attraction geography remains locality-level because Sprint 8 did not find defensible mapped/GIS/geotagged site or object geometry.

A preferred safe parking or viewing point for the Big Shoe has not yet been independently map-checked.

Open-licence image search completed 24 August 2026. No defensible reusable image with file-level commercial-use provenance was verified in the completed Commons, government/open-licence and archival/open-collection sweep.

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