Morty the Snail – Queanbeyan

Sensory park is the phrase that explains the design. These are spaces built for people with sensory processing differences and disabilities – textures to touch, varied surfaces, things to climb on or into, plantings chosen for smell and sound. An interactive sculpture in that setting is not decoration; it is equipment, meant to be handled rather than photographed.

A snail is unusually well suited to it. The spiral shell is a shape hands follow naturally, it has no sharp features, and the animal itself is the slowest and least threatening thing in a garden – which matters in a space designed for people who find fast and loud environments difficult.

This is the catalogue's second giant snail, after Bremer Bay's on the Native Snail Trail in Western Australia. Both are unexpected choices; neither town has any commercial or historical reason to pick the animal, which suggests the snail's appeal is formal rather than symbolic.

A 175th birthday puts Queanbeyan's founding around 1838, and the town's long complication is that it sits immediately over the border from a national capital that was carved out of its hinterland.

No source located gives the height, the materials and any date at all.