This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 17.9339° S, 145.9272° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Nearly eight metres of golden gumboot, and the height is the whole point: it matches the town's record annual rainfall.
Tully claims the wettest town title in Australia, and the competition is real. Tully, Babinda and Innisfail on the far north Queensland wet tropics coast have argued over it for decades – the Golden Gumboot trophy passed between them annually, awarded to whichever town recorded the most rain that year, long before anyone built a monument. The permanent gumboot at Banyan Park is that rivalry made concrete.
The 1950 record of 7.9 metres is the figure the sculpture stands for. Nearly eight metres of rain in one year is a number most Australians find hard to credit, and rendering it as height rather than printing it on a sign is the smartest thing about the object: you look up, and that is what a year's rain looks like.
A gumboot is also the correct footwear, and a modest one. It says the rain is not a spectacle here but a working condition – banana farms, cane, mud, and a wet season that shuts things down.
The structure includes a viewing platform reached by an internal staircase, which puts it in the small group of Big Things you can enter and climb, alongside the Goulburn merino and the Coffs Harbour banana.
Tully sits between Cairns and Townsville at the foot of Mount Tyson, in country that also holds World Heritage rainforest and some of the best whitewater rafting in Australia.
The hand behind it and any date at all did not survive into any source.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
