Indigenous Land Art Bogong Moth

Bruce, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

Public art

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Checked by Project Big Things · Sep 2026

This Big Thing is recorded as still being here.

A large landscape-scale public artwork whose stones form a bogong moth when viewed from above.

Private to your Passport.

PLAN YOUR VISIT

No recommended arrival yet

We have not checked a recommended place to arrive or stop here yet.

This takes you to the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.

Indigenous Land Art Bogong Moth

This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.

35.25438° S, 149.09288° E

FIELD GUIDE

The story

From the road it is an arrangement of stones. From above it is a bogong moth.

The work sits on Gungahlin Drive at Bruce, made from stone, timber and steel, and artsACT confirms it dates from 2007. The moth form is legible from above, while the installation is deliberately experienced by passing motorists at ground level – so the artwork has two entirely different readings depending on whether you are in a car or an aircraft.

That is a genuinely ambitious thing to attempt on an arterial road. Land art at this scale is normally made for remote sites where the aerial view is the only view; embedding one in a suburban traffic corridor means most of its audience will never see the shape at all, and will experience it as a rhythm of stones passing the window instead.

The bogong moth is the right subject for Ngunnawal country. The moths migrate to the Australian Alps in enormous numbers each spring, and Aboriginal people travelled into the high country for millennia to meet them. Canberra has a second work on the theme – the cast-concrete moths at Acton between the National Museum and AIATSIS, commissioned in 2001 from a design by Ngunnawal artist Jim Williams with Matthew Harding.

This entry does not attempt to describe or interpret the cultural content. artsACT records the work as Indigenous land art, and that is the appropriate limit here; the artist is not named in the material available, which is a gap worth closing.

The interchange nearby carries Rhizome, a sculptural marker designed to resemble indigenous grasses.

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PRACTICAL

Plan your stop

WHAT TO EXPECT

artsACT confirms the 2007 Indigenous Land Art installation on Gungahlin Drive at Bruce. OpenStreetMap independently maps the artwork footprint at approximately -35.25438, 149.09288; the stones form a large bogong moth when viewed from above.

ACCESS

The Indigenous Land Art / Bogong Moth is a roadside/gateway artwork beside Gungahlin Drive. artsACT describes the Gungahlin Drive Extension Public Art Program as designed to enhance the driving/riding experience, and specifically describes the stones as seen by passing motorists. Treat this as a drive/riding-view artwork rather than a walk-up destination. Do not stop on Gungahlin Drive or navigate vehicles to the artwork; a separate lawful off-road viewing point, if one exists, remains optional research.

COMMUNITY

Visitor Log

WHAT'S NEXT

Find another Big Thing nearby

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Big Owl – Belconnen

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A monumental Powerful Owl sculpture at the corner of Belconnen Way and Benjamin Way.

Public art

2.4 km away

TRANSPARENCY

Sources & research

ACT Legislative Assembly Hansard – Gungahlin Drive bogong moth

ACT Legislative Assembly · recorded 2026-08-23

Assembly debate independently confirms the bogong moth sculpture on Gungahlin Drive.

Government

artsACT – Indigenous Land Art

artsACT · recorded 2026-08-22

Official ACT Government public-art record.

Government

What we're still checking

Current attraction geography remains locality-level because Sprint 8 did not find defensible mapped/GIS/geotagged site or object geometry.

Preferred visitor parking/photo arrival has not yet been independently verified.

Open-licence image search completed 24 August 2026. No defensible reusable image with file-level commercial-use provenance was verified in the completed Commons, government/open-licence and archival/open-collection sweep.

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