This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 38.5142° S, 145.3587° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
A curling wave and a surfboard, placed at the point where the bridge lands on Phillip Island.
Visit Phillip Island promotes the Big Wave at 10 Phillip Island Road as a photo stop, and Visit Victoria identifies the operating Big Wave Complex at the same address. Newhaven is the first thing you reach after crossing from San Remo, which makes this a gateway object – the announcement that you have arrived somewhere different.
The subject is well judged. Phillip Island's surf beaches on the ocean side are serious water, and Woolamai in particular is one of Victoria's best-known and most dangerous breaks. The island's identity is split between the penguins, the motorcycle circuit and the surf, and only one of those makes a good sculpture.
A wave is also a genuinely difficult form to build. Almost everything else in this catalogue is a solid object with an obvious silhouette – a fruit, an animal, a tool. A breaking wave is motion, translucency and a shape that exists for about two seconds, so rendering it in a fixed material is a real design problem rather than a scaling exercise.
The complex around it is a working retail and visitor site, with the Newhaven visitor point nearby where you can talk to a local and pick up maps, locally made products and souvenirs.
The measurements, what it is made from and the year it went up were left unrecorded.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Visit Phillip Island currently promotes the famous Big Wave at 10 Phillip Island Road as a photo stop, and Visit Victoria identifies the operating Big Wave Complex at the same address.
ACCESS
Navigate to the Big Wave Complex at 10 Phillip Island Road and use lawful on-site visitor access; do not stop on Phillip Island Road itself.
