Giant Gollum – Wellington Airport

He did not last as long as the birds. The sculpture was removed in 2016, roughly four years after it went up – a fact The Spinoff later noted with the obvious comparison, that like Gollum himself, who died in the fiery pit of Mount Doom clutching his ring, the sculpture was not to last.

Why he went when the eagles stayed another nine years is not something the record explains. It may simply be that a fifteen-metre eagle in flight is a welcome and a thirteen-metre Gollum is a warning, and that an airport eventually notices the difference.

What the pair of them represent is a specific and now-closed period: the years when Wellington was formally, enthusiastically the Middle-earth capital, when the airport terminal doubled as a film set and the city renamed itself on the arrivals sign. Those installations were not decoration. They were a small country's tourism strategy, executed in polystyrene and resin at a scale nobody has attempted since.

Where Gollum went after 2016 is not recorded.

His disappearance also went almost unremarked at the time, unlike the eagles' farewell nine years later. A sculpture removed quietly in 2016 left no announcement, no parade and no explanation – only an absence that a journalist noticed in passing five years afterwards.