The Big Slurpee

Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, Australia

Roadside giants

Historical – no longer at this location

Historical record · Aug 2026

This Big Thing is recorded for its history. It is no longer at this location, so it is not a stop to plan a trip around.

An 11-metre promotional Slurpee cup erected at Coffs Harbour Showground in late 2008 as a temporary 7-Eleven Big Thing and dismantled in 2009.

Private to your Passport.

PLANNING A VISIT?

Not a stop to travel to

This Big Thing is recorded for its history. It is no longer at this location, so it is not a stop to plan a trip around.

The Big Slurpee

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

Site-level location · 30.2924° S, 153.1207° E

FIELD GUIDE

The story

The Big Slurpee was always going to be dismantled. That was in the plan from the start, which makes it one of the very few Big Things built with an end date.

7-Eleven put it up at the Coffs Harbour Showground in late 2008 to promote the arrival of its largest ever Slurpee cup, a 1.2-litre vessel that apparently warranted an eleven-metre monument. The installation was a full-size Slurpee cup complete with straw, and the campaign around it – created by Leo Burnett Melbourne – took in point of sale, PR and digital, along with a suite of Big Slurpee souvenirs.

The choice of town was deliberate and, in its way, a compliment. The agency's creative director noted the monument was going in the middle of the showground of a city famous for being home to the Big Banana. Coffs Harbour was selected because it was already Big Thing country: the audience there was pre-trained to stop and photograph an enormous object, and the campaign borrowed that reflex wholesale.

The Coffs Harbour siting was only part of a six-week campaign, and the agency was reported at the time to be working on finding the Big Slurpee a permanent home. It never got one. The structure was dismantled in 2009.

There is something clarifying about it. Most Big Things are advertising that accidentally became landmarks, and we tend to remember them as folk art because they stayed long enough to be adopted. The Big Slurpee is the same object with the accident removed – pure marketing, professionally made, nationally coordinated, and gone inside a year. It is the control experiment for the whole genre.

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PRACTICAL

Plan your stop

WHAT TO EXPECT

Historical listing only. Contemporary advertising-industry reporting describes the 11-metre installation as a six-week promotional campaign, while subsequent records confirm it was dismantled in 2009.

ACCESS

No visitor navigation is provided because the Big Slurpee no longer exists.

COMMUNITY

Visitor Log

WHAT'S NEXT

Find another Big Thing nearby

Current – limited access

The Big Windmill

Coffs Harbour, New South Wales

A prominent Dutch-style windmill structure at the Coffs Windmill Motel, a long-running Coffs Harbour roadside icon whose site dates to the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Buildings and structures

2.2 km away

TRANSPARENCY

Sources & research

AdNews – 7-Eleven builds giant Slurpee

AdNews · recorded 2026-08-22

News

Coffs Harbour Showground – Find Us

Coffs Harbour Showground · recorded 2026-08-22

Official

Wikipedia – Big things (Australia)

Wikipedia · recorded 2026-08-22

Community

What we're still checking

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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