This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
23.44387° S, 144.27389° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
The Ringer began as a twelve-centimetre figure on a table, and ended up three metres high in solid bronze.
Eddie Hackman adapted it in 1987 from one of his Outback Character series – a small study scaled up more than twenty times – and it was unveiled in 1988 to mark the opening of the Australian Stockman's Hall of Fame at Longreach. A ringer, in the language of the industry it depicts, is a stockman working cattle; the word is specific, and using it rather than calling the sculpture The Stockman is the first sign of how carefully the thing was thought about.
Solid bronze is the other. Almost no oversized Australian sculpture is cast bronze at that scale, because the cost is in a different category entirely from fibreglass or steel. Choosing it says the Hall of Fame regarded this as a permanent national monument rather than a roadside draw.
The institution behind it had a long gestation. The concept was first raised by the artist Hugh Sawrey in 1974, a non-profit company was incorporated in 1977 and run by a council of twenty men and women with at least two from each state, and the site chosen at Longreach in central western Queensland had once been a teamster's stop beside a large waterhole – which is about as fitting a location as could have been found. Feiko Bouman designed the building.
The Hall of Fame is a tribute to the pioneers of the Australian outback, and its own dedication extends to stockmen and to Aboriginal people who showed courage in that country. The Ringer stands at the front of it.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
The Ringer is a three-metre-high solid bronze stockman standing prominently at the front of the Australian Stockman's Hall of Fame in Longreach. Its monumental scale and strong Big Thing tradition place it in the Extended catalogue rather than the everyday-object Core category.
ACCESS
The Ringer stands at the front of the Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame. Navigate to the Hall of Fame visitor venue on the Landsborough Highway and use its car park; the statue is roughly 60 metres from the mapped venue arrival.
