This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
28.66194° S, 151.93417° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
It works. That is the whole design.
Opened in 2018 beside the visitor information centre, the ten-metre thermometer is linked to live automated weather equipment, so the reading it shows is the actual temperature rather than a painted number. Almost nothing else in this catalogue does anything. A giant fruit is inert; this one is an instrument.
Stanthorpe's claim is that it is Queensland's coolest town, and it means the temperature. At around eight hundred metres on the Granite Belt, it gets frosts through winter, occasional snow, and readings that regularly go below zero – which in a state defined by heat is genuinely remarkable and locally treasured. The town has recorded some of Queensland's lowest temperatures.
So the monument is not to a crop or an animal but to a number, and it displays that number live. It is the most literal object in the collection.
It is also a rare case of a Big Thing that can be wrong. If the equipment fails, the landmark is visibly broken in a way a fibreglass pineapple never can be, which is a maintenance commitment most towns would not take on.
The Granite Belt's cold is also its economy. It is why apples and stone fruit grow here and why the district produces cool-climate wine, in the same country as the Thulimbah Royal Gala and the Ballandean triceratops.
Stanthorpe sits on the New England Highway near the New South Wales border.
No record survives of the designer or the fabricator.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
