This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
31.96422° S, 115.83621° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
A double helix you can climb, built in 1966 – thirteen years after Watson, Crick and Franklin's work made the shape famous, and long before it became the visual cliché of biology.
The DNA Tower in Kings Park is fifteen metres high with 101 steps, two spiral staircases winding around each other exactly as the molecule's strands do. It is a genuinely elegant piece of thinking: a double helix is structurally a pair of intertwined spirals, and a pair of intertwined spiral staircases is therefore not a representation of DNA but an actual instance of the same geometry. The building method and the subject are the same thing.
It is also a rare case of a Big Thing about an idea. Almost every object in this collection depicts something physical – a fruit, an animal, a tool, a product. This one depicts a molecule nobody has seen, at a magnification of many hundreds of millions, in a public park.
The date is what makes it remarkable. In 1966 the structure of DNA was recent, specialist knowledge; building a public observation tower in its shape was a considerable bet on the idea mattering. It has aged extremely well.
Kings Park itself is 400 hectares of bushland, gardens and lakes on the escarpment above the Swan River in the middle of Perth, and one of the largest inner-city parks anywhere. The tower gives a view out over it.
It was fully refurbished in 2021, so the steps are sound.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Current Kings Park material continues to identify the DNA Tower as a visitor feature. The 15-metre tower has 101 steps and was fully refurbished in 2021.
ACCESS
The DNA Tower is within Kings Park at the Forrest Drive end of Broadwalk Vista. Drivers should use Roe Carpark on Forrest Drive, one of the Botanic Gardens and Parks Authority's named Kings Park visitor car parks, independently mapped in OpenStreetMap about 220 m south-east of the tower, and walk from there. BGPA's current named-carpark list does not include a separately named DNA Tower car park. Kings Park parking is free for park visitors only; do not park and leave the park.
Botanic Gardens and Parks Authority · recorded 2026-09-11
Lists Kings Park's named car parks including Roe Carpark; parking is free for visitors within the park boundaries; no separately named DNA Tower car park is listed.
OpenStreetMap way 42552497 'Roe Carpark' (amenity=parking) at -31.965983, 115.837178; DNA Tower viewpoint listed about 210 m north-west. Used as the map-checked arrival.
