Giant Trout

The project captured the imagination of local school students and businesses, and a groundswell of support built for continuing the process through the whole town. An application went in for federal funding to create troutified street signage. The community, supported by a creative artist, began in earnest in early 2004, and the theme proved infectious: local businesses adopted it in their signage and displays and contributed additional money to troutify further town features.

The outcome, as the council puts it, is a community transformed – a town troutified in splendid style, luring in tourists, with palpable local pride. They went on to establish an annual Trout Expo, the seventh of which was held in September 2011.

The Giant Trout in Bartholomew Park, on the corner of Main and Church streets, is the centrepiece of all that, promoted by the official Heritage Highway guide.

Cressy was established around 1855, taking its name from an English syndicate formed to breed horses and stock on a twenty-thousand-acre land grant, and sits below the Western Tiers.

It is the clearest case in this catalogue of a single object being the visible part of a whole-town strategy.