The Big Whiting – Hervey Bay

Whiting are the bread-and-butter catch of the Queensland and New South Wales coast. Sand whiting and winter whiting are taken from the shallows in enormous numbers by people standing in knee-deep water with a hand line, and Hervey Bay's sheltered flats are among the best places in the country to do it. If you grew up on that coast, whiting is what you actually caught.

So the sculpture celebrates ordinary fishing rather than trophy fishing, which is a genuinely different statement from the Cairns marlin on its pole.

Current Big Things and visitor sources continue to identify it at the active Hervey Bay Historical Village & Museum on Zephyr Street at Scarness – a volunteer-run heritage village of relocated buildings and collections, and the kind of institution that keeps such objects going long after a commercial owner would have removed them.

Hervey Bay therefore holds two catalogue entries with very different registers: the civic bronze-and-ironbark whale, and a fibreglass fish outside a volunteer museum.

No source located gives any attribution, the measurements, the material used and the year it went up.