This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 36.0501° S, 146.4681° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
A water tower from 1900, given a mesh top in 1969 so that it would read as a wine bottle.
That is a more interesting piece of work than building something new. The tower already existed and already had the right proportions; adding a shoulder and neck in mesh converted a piece of municipal infrastructure into the town's emblem without knocking anything down.
It also means the object is a century and a quarter old in its first life and over half a century old in its second, which puts the conversion itself among the earlier Big Thing gestures in Australia – 1969 is a year after the Tocumwal cod and five after the Big Banana.
Rutherglen's claim is unimpeachable. This is one of Australia's oldest wine districts, established in the gold rush era, and it is internationally significant for fortified wine – the muscats and topaques made here are among the very few Australian wines with a genuine world reputation in their category, produced by families who have been at it since the nineteenth century. The district also survived phylloxera, which destroyed most Victorian viticulture and from which many regions never recovered.
The bottle is an official free landmark, always open, maintained for community use and tourism.
It belongs to the painted-and-converted-infrastructure branch of the catalogue, with the Marrickville silo pale ale can, the Mourquong wine cask and the Myrtleford chimney. Of those it is the oldest structure and the only one where the conversion is structural rather than paintwork.
Not documented anywhere: a date and the person responsible.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
