This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
38.47524° S, 145.47244° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
You went in through the mouth and walked down the gut. The Giant Worm at Bass was a museum shaped like an earthworm, and its interior included a simulated stomach.
It was built in 1985 at Wildlife Wonderland, beside the Bass Highway in South Gippsland, to celebrate a genuinely remarkable local animal. The Giant Gippsland earthworm is the largest of Australia's earthworms and lives only in a small area of this district – averaging around a metre long, and reported considerably longer. They live deep in wet clay soils along stream banks, are rarely seen, and make an audible gurgling sound underground when disturbed. A district with an animal like that has every right to build a walk-through model of it.
The attraction closed, and the structure was left. Over years of vacancy it was broken into and vandalised, deteriorating steadily, and local reporting records the derelict worm being demolished in December 2020.
It is one of the more genuinely regrettable losses in the catalogue. Walk-through Big Things are rare, educational walk-through Big Things rarer still, and this one existed to explain a threatened species that most Australians have never heard of and will never see. The Giant Gippsland earthworm remains protected and remains difficult to observe. The building that made it comprehensible to a carload of children on the way to Phillip Island is gone.
Nothing replaced it on the site.
The Giant Gippsland earthworm remains listed as vulnerable, and it is still almost impossible for an ordinary visitor to see one. Losing the building that explained it removed the main point of public contact with the species in its own district.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Built in 1985 to celebrate the Gippsland Giant Earthworm, the attraction contained an enormous worm-shaped museum and interactive displays. Local reporting records that the derelict structure was demolished in December 2020 after years of closure and vandalism.
ACCESS
Historical record only. The former site is not presented as a current visitor destination and there is no current arrival point.
