This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
37.81397° S, 144.96350° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Thousands of people sit on it every day without registering that it is a purse.
In January 1994 the City of Melbourne called for design submissions for unique and distinctive forms of street seating, and Simon Perry's The Public Purse was one of the works chosen. It was commissioned through the council's Percent for Art Program, under which one per cent of the capital works budget went to public art – an unglamorous administrative mechanism responsible for a great deal of what makes Australian cities worth walking through.
The object is granite and stainless steel, about sixty-five centimetres high and two metres long, shaped as an oversized purse dropped in the street with its clasp slightly open. It sits at the corner of Bourke Street Mall and Elizabeth Street, outside the old GPO.
What makes it work is the brief it answers. It was designed as seating first, and it is genuinely good seating: the right height, the right length, hard-wearing, and impossible to damage. The joke is a bonus rather than the purpose, which is why it has survived thirty years in the busiest pedestrian space in Melbourne without becoming tiresome.
The pun is a good one too. A public purse is the money a council spends, and this one was paid for out of exactly that – a sculpture funded by the public purse, in the shape of the public purse, sitting outside the post office.
It is small for this catalogue, and it earns its place on wit rather than scale.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Public Purse is an oversized granite and stainless-steel purse sculpture by Simon Perry, measuring about 65 centimetres high by 2 metres long, deliberately resembling an oversized dropped purse. It doubles as public seating at the corner of Bourke Street Mall and Elizabeth Street, outside the former GPO.
ACCESS
Pedestrian/public-realm attraction. No vehicle destination is required; approach on foot from the surrounding public realm.
