The Big Wheat – Ouyen

Read in sequence they are cause and effect. The mallee root is what had to be grubbed out of the ground – the massive lignotuber of a mallee eucalypt, one at a time, across millions of hectares – and the wheat is what was sown in its place. No other town in this catalogue has arranged its two monuments as a before and after.

The Mallee's wheat country is marginal and always has been. Low rainfall, sandy soils, and a settlement history of soldier settlement blocks that failed, drift and dust in the 1930s and 1940s, and a long slow consolidation into fewer and larger farms. Modern minimum-till and stubble-retention practice, much of it developed by growers in exactly this country, is the reason the district still produces at all.

Wheat is also a difficult thing to sculpt. A head of grain is fine, spiky and repetitive, with none of the solid readable outline a fruit or an animal offers, which makes it a more demanding subject than its ubiquity suggests.

Ouyen sits at the junction of the Calder and Mallee Highways, and Blackburn Park is its front garden.

Nothing located supplies a date, the maker, the height and the materials.