This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 41.5264° S, 146.8357° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Six metres of cricket stumps in a Tasmanian village, commemorating a Test batsman most people have never heard of.
Jack Badcock came from Westbury and played seven Tests for Australia in the late 1930s. He was, by first-class record, a genuinely outstanding batsman – an average well into the fifties across his career, and among the most prolific run-scorers in Sheffield Shield cricket of the period – but his Test record was poor, and he is remembered as one of the more striking cases of a player whose domestic form never translated.
That makes the memorial rather touching. A town commemorating a local who went to the very top and then struggled there is a more honest kind of monument than one celebrating unqualified success, and Westbury has done it at six metres.
Cricket monuments in this catalogue tend toward the enormous. The eight-metre bat and stumps at Cootamundra mark Bradman's birthplace, and Bradman's shadow falls across Badcock's story too: they were contemporaries, and Badcock played in the same era that Bradman dominated.
Westbury is a small Georgian village in northern Tasmania on the Meander Valley road, known for its village green and eighteenth-century-style layout – an unusually formal English plan for an Australian country town.
Stumps are also a good subject for enlargement: three verticals and two bails, instantly recognisable in silhouette, and structurally straightforward to build tall.
There is no record of the person responsible or a date.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Tourism Tasmania currently promotes the Big Wickets as a Westbury stop and identifies them as 6 m high.
ACCESS
Public cricket-ground attraction in Westbury. Navigate to the cricket-ground precinct and use lawful local parking rather than treating the wickets themselves as a parking point.
