This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
31.67686° S, 128.88403° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
A ten-metre ferro-concrete whale beside a roadhouse at Eucla, which is about as isolated a position as any object in this catalogue occupies.
Historical geotagged photography fixes the sculpture outside the Eucla Hotel Motel and records it at roughly ten metres long, three metres wide and three metres high, and RAC WA continues to feature the Leeuwin Way Whale in 2026.
Eucla sits on the Nullarbor a few kilometres from the South Australian border, at the top of the Eucla Pass, with a permanent population in the dozens and the nearest town of any size hundreds of kilometres away. It exists because the road and the old telegraph line pass through.
The whale is not arbitrary. The Great Australian Bight below the cliffs here is one of the world's most significant southern right whale nurseries – the animals come inshore to calve between May and October, and the Head of Bight viewing platforms further east are among the best land-based whale watching anywhere. Eucla is on that coast.
Ferro-concrete is a good choice for the Nullarbor. It is cement rendered over steel mesh, the technique used for boat hulls and water tanks, and it tolerates extreme heat, UV and salt in a way fibreglass does not.
This record has no attached approved sources, and the whale's maker and installation date are unrecorded – a considerable gap for a ten-metre object on the country's most travelled remote highway.
The old Eucla telegraph station ruins, half buried in the dunes below, are the other reason people stop.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
RAC WA continues to feature the Leeuwin Way Whale in 2026. Historical geotagged photography fixes the sculpture outside the Eucla Hotel Motel and records dimensions of about 10 m long, 3 m wide and 3 m high.
ACCESS
The Leeuwin Way Whale stands in the Eucla roadhouse car-park setting. Navigate to the Eucla Motor Hotel / Roadhouse visitor site and use the established parking; the mapped arrival is separate from the exact whale coordinate and is only a short walk away. Do not stop on the Eyre Highway traffic lane.
