This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 36.9182° S, 142.5140° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Fourteen metres of koala on the Western Highway, built in 1989, and renamed years later after a koala the whole country had watched drink from a firefighter's water bottle.
Sam became famous in February 2009, during the Black Saturday bushfires, when footage of a burnt koala accepting water from a CFA volunteer went around the world. She survived the fire, was treated for burns, and died some months later during unrelated surgery. For a great many people she was the single image that made the scale of that day comprehensible.
Renaming an existing 1989 landmark after her converted a roadside attraction into a memorial. That is an unusual afterlife for a Big Thing – most are built for a purpose and keep it, while this one acquired a meaning twenty years in that its builders never intended.
The placement is apt in a way that has since become painful. Dadswells Bridge sits at the edge of the Grampians, and the Grampians have burned repeatedly and severely in the years since.
The structure remains a current landmark and an official tourism photo stop. Interior retail access should not be assumed – the building beneath has traded and closed under various operators over the years, and the record deliberately declines to state what is open.
Koalas are among the more common Big Thing subjects, but this is the largest and by some distance the most affecting, and the only one carrying a name that means something outside the town it stands in.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
The Giant Koala remains a current Dadswells Bridge landmark and official tourism photo stop. Current sources confirm the structure; interior retail access should not be assumed.
ACCESS
Use the established Giant Koala roadside site off the Western Highway. Follow onsite signage and parking arrangements rather than stopping on the highway.
