The Giant Gingerbread Men

The Ginger Factory is one of the older tourist operations on the Sunshine Coast, built around Buderim Ginger, which processed a genuine local crop before the site became an attraction. Ginger grows well in the subtropical hinterland, and Australia's production has long been concentrated in this small area – so the factory tour is not a tourism invention dressed as industry but the other way round.

Gingerbread men are the right subject for a strange reason: they are the only food shaped like a person that everyone accepts without comment. Enlarging one produces something faintly unnerving, since a gingerbread man at human scale stops being a biscuit and becomes a figure – and the source's warning not to eat them is funnier for it.

They belong to the small group of paired Big Things in this catalogue, with the Gumlu pumpkin and watermelon and the Booie peanuts. Pairs work differently from single objects: they suggest a scene rather than a landmark.

This is also one of very few entries where the object's material is explicitly recorded – fibreglass and metal – which is more than most forecourt sculptures here can offer.

Their measurements and their age go unrecorded.