The Big Slouch Hat

The building it sits on was Mackay's RSL. Returned and Services League clubs have long been the social centre of Australian country towns as well as their memorial institutions, and a landmark like this does double duty: it marks the building, and it marks what the building is for.

What the record does not establish is when the hat went up, who made it, or what it cost. It is a long-standing local landmark rather than a recently documented one, and the sources that place it – a dated 2022 photograph, and the specialist Big Things registers that continue to list it at 70 Sydney Street – confirm that it is there without saying where it came from. Anyone who knows the answer would be worth listening to.

What can be said about the object itself is that the slouch hat is among the most loaded pieces of iconography in Australia. It is the headwear of the Australian Imperial Force, the shape on the Rising Sun badge, and the single most recognisable visual shorthand for Australian military service – which means an oversized one is almost never a joke about scale. Wherever they appear, giant slouch hats are memorials or they are adjacent to memorials.

Without a plaque or a documented commissioning record, though, this one's specific occasion cannot be stated, and this entry will not guess at it.