This Big Thing is recorded for its history. It is no longer at this location, so it is not a stop to plan a trip around.
The former 1:40-scale Uluru replica built for Leyland Brothers World in 1990, later used as The Rock Roadhouse and completely destroyed by fire on 31 July 2018.
Private to your Passport.
PLANNING A VISIT?
Not a stop to travel to
This Big Thing is recorded for its history. It is no longer at this location, so it is not a stop to plan a trip around.
This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 32.6149° S, 152.0802° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Someone built Uluru on the Pacific Highway, at one-fortieth scale, and then it burned down.
The replica went up in 1990 as part of Leyland Brothers World – a theme park built by Mike and Mal Leyland, whose television travel series had made the Australian outback familiar to a generation of viewers who had never been there. The park had amusement rides, a bush camp and a roadhouse, and the fake Uluru was both its centrepiece and, eventually, its most durable asset.
The park did not last, but the rock did. It carried on for years as The Rock Roadhouse, a fuel and food stop north of Newcastle near Hawks Nest, and became a fixture of the drive up the mid-north coast – one of those objects people used to measure a road trip by, and photograph on the way past without ever quite planning to.
On 31 July 2018 fire ripped through it. The ABC reported the roadhouse engulfed in a fierce blaze and destroyed; the National Film and Sound Archive's own account of Leyland Brothers World records the replica as having survived as The Rock Roadhouse until its destruction in 2018 by fire – noting the cause with a certain weariness, since fire had been a recurring theme in the site's history.
One thing needs to be clear for anyone navigating to it. A business called The Rock Roadhouse operates at the same highway site today. It is not the replica. The structure that made the place famous is gone, and what stands there now is an ordinary roadhouse carrying the name.
The scale is worth holding onto: a fortieth of Uluru, in fibreglass, on a highway, for twenty-eight years.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
This is a historical Big Thing listing. The original rock-shaped roadhouse was destroyed in 2018. A modern business called The Rock Roadhouse now operates at the same highway site, but it is not the destroyed replica structure.
ACCESS
Historical listing only. The Uluru-replica structure no longer exists. The current Rock Roadhouse is a separate modern roadside business and should not be represented as the surviving Big Thing.
