This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 41.2835° S, 146.4931° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Kenny the Kennebec is an anthropomorphic potato on a pole, and he has been greeting traffic on the Bass Highway at Sassafras for about forty years.
He was built by the family of Jeremy Rockliff, later Premier of Tasmania – which is a genuinely unusual line in a Big Things entry, and one that says something accurate about north-west Tasmania. This is farming country where the families that grow the crop are also the families in public life, and the giant potato is a family farm's sign rather than a government project.
The Kennebec is a specific variety, not a generic potato: a white-skinned, high-yielding type long grown in Tasmania and favoured for chips. Naming the sculpture after the cultivar rather than calling it the Big Potato is the sort of precision that only a district that actually grows them would bother with.
He is made of fibreglass and cement, and in October 2023 strong winds blew him down. That is how most Big Things end – not demolished, just toppled one bad night and never put back up. Kenny was different. He was restored and re-erected in January 2024 after a three-month hiatus, and current regional tourism material lists him again among the north-west's Big Things.
That gap is the most interesting thing about him. Three months is exactly the window in which a damaged roadside object is usually quietly written off. Somebody decided he was worth the repair bill instead, which is the only reason a forty-year-old fibreglass potato is still standing on the Bass Highway.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Kenny Kennebec, the Big Spud, is an anthropomorphic giant potato and one of Tasmania's classic roadside Big Things, sited on the Bass Highway at Sassafras.
ACCESS
The Big Spud stands beside the operating United Petroleum Sassafras service-station site. Navigate to the service centre and follow normal forecourt traffic and parking arrangements; the stored point represents the service-site destination rather than a surveyed parking bay.
