The Big Turtle

Forster, New South Wales, Australia

Roadside giants

✓

Current

Checked by Project Big Things · Aug 2026

This Big Thing is recorded as still being here.

A carved timber turtle on the Forster waterfront boardwalk beside Wallis Lake.

Private to your Passport.

PLAN YOUR VISIT

No recommended arrival yet

We have not checked a recommended place to arrive or stop here yet.

This takes you to the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.

The Big Turtle

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

Approximate location · 32.180° S, 152.512° E

FIELD GUIDE

The story

A carved timber turtle on the boardwalk at Forster, looking out over Wallis Lake.

The setting is the argument for it. Wallis Lake is a large coastal lagoon on the mid-north coast of New South Wales, and the entrance at Forster-Tuncurry is where it meets the sea. Marine turtles use these waters, and the lake system is a significant estuary – so a turtle on the waterfront is depicting something present rather than imported.

Timber is the interesting choice. Carved wood on an exposed coastal boardwalk has a much shorter life than fibreglass or bronze, needing sealing and attention, and choosing it anyway suggests the work was commissioned as a carving rather than ordered as signage. It also puts it in the small group of hand-carved rather than moulded objects in this catalogue, alongside the kookaburra at Mons and Fergus the bull in the Ferguson Valley.

Forster sits on Memorial Drive along the waterfront, and current 2025–26 visitor and map sources continue to identify the turtle there – a stretch that is essentially the town's front room, with the boardwalk, the breakwall and the lake traffic.

Wallis Lake is also nationally known for its oysters, so the district could easily have chosen a bivalve. A turtle is a better sculpture and a worse advertisement, which suggests it was made for residents rather than for commerce.

Neither the sources nor the catalogue give a named maker, the measurements and any date at all.

Add a photo

PRACTICAL

Plan your stop

WHAT TO EXPECT

Current 2025-26 visitor and map sources continue to identify the Big Turtle on Memorial Drive/Forster waterfront.

ACCESS

The Big Turtle is on the public Gregory Reserve / Pelican Boardwalk foreshore on Memorial Drive. MidCoast Council and NSW Crown-land records confirm Gregory Reserve includes public car-park land, and Council mobility mapping shows the reserve/boardwalk in the town-centre pedestrian network. Direct sculpture navigation remains withheld because neither the exact turtle pin nor a numeric preferred parking point has yet been independently map-checked.

COMMUNITY

Visitor Log

WHAT'S NEXT

Find another Big Thing nearby

✓

Current

The Big Motorcycle

Nabiac, New South Wales

An oversized blue motorcycle displayed outside the National Motorcycle Museum in Nabiac.

Roadside giants

15 km away

TRANSPARENCY

Sources & research

Big things Australia

Wikipedia · recorded 2026-08-22

Community

Forster & Tuncurry travel report

Aussirose Travel and Photography · recorded 2026-08-22

Community

The Big Turtle listing

Evendo · 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.

The Big Turtle is confirmed on the Forster waterfront / Memorial Drive boardwalk, but the current coordinate is only an approximate foreshore anchor and is not claimed as a site-grade sculpture point.

The Big Turtle is confirmed at Gregory Reserve / Pelican Boardwalk on Memorial Drive, but its exact sculpture coordinate has not yet been independently map-checked.

Something not right?

If this Big Thing has changed, moved or gone, telling us keeps the guide honest for the next traveller.

Suggest an update →Report a problem →