Gathering the Bounty – Tooleybuc

The figure represents the river itself gathering the agricultural bounty of the Riverina, which is a considerably more conceptual proposition than most entries here. Nearly everything in this collection is a scaled-up literal thing: a fruit, an animal, a tool. An abstract eleven-metre human standing for a watercourse is closer to contemporary public sculpture than to roadside advertising, and it arrives through a curated art trail rather than a business wanting attention from the highway.

Internal lighting is the other modern signature. A landmark designed to work after dark, in a small river town where the streetlights end quickly, is doing something no fibreglass banana ever attempted.

The subject is right. Tooleybuc sits on the Murray at a bridge crossing, and everything grown in this country – citrus, stone fruit, grapes, almonds, rice – exists because of irrigation water drawn from that river. Crediting the river as the gatherer rather than the farmers is a pointed way to put it, and a timely one given how contested Murray-Darling water allocation has become.

No answer exists for a materials note.