The Big Sugar Cane Stick

The pairing with a directory is the practical part. A town directory board is the thing travellers actually stop to read, and putting a landmark beside it means the object is seen by everyone who pulls over to work out where the bakery is.

Cane is the correct subject and, oddly, an uncommon one. Sugar built the entire Queensland coast from the Burdekin north – the mills, the tramways, the ports, the towns – and yet very few of those towns have an oversized cane stalk. Home Hill is the exception, and it makes the district's actual crop its landmark rather than something more photogenic.

The reason is probably that cane is hard to render. A stalk is a plain segmented pole, visually closer to bamboo than to anything distinctive, and it does not read from a distance the way a fruit or an animal does.

Home Hill already has an unusually idiosyncratic collection – the giant question mark in Lloyd Mann Gardens from the 2017 Canefields Ephemera programme, and the opened sardine tin made by Vass Engineering and Sam Scuderi in 2018 for the Harvest Festival. The cane stick is the only one of the three that explains what the district grows.

Nothing available settles its scale, the date and a named maker.