This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 46.1006° S, 168.9339° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
The ram in Gore's Main Street is a Romney, and the breed choice is the whole statement.
Romneys are a long-woolled English breed that adapted extraordinarily well to New Zealand conditions, and for most of the twentieth century they were the backbone of the national flock – the sheep that carried the wool and meat economy on which the country's prosperity was built. Southland's pastoral wealth ran on them. Gore District enjoyed a long run of prosperity from the end of the Second World War until 1976, driven by record prices for agricultural produce, and the foundations laid then are what the town still runs on.
A statue of a specific breed rather than a generic sheep is a claim about which part of that history belongs here.
The town around it has more character than most. Gore was named after Thomas Gore Browne, then Governor of New Zealand, and grew around a ford on the Mataura River. Prohibition ran here from 1902 to 1957, and the legacy persists: beer and wine still cannot be bought in supermarkets, because Gore remains part of a licensing trust area. The town was the third in New Zealand to install a generator and supply public electricity, following the establishment of the Gore Electric Light and Power Syndicate in 1894.
The ram is one of three significant oversized objects in the same small town, alongside the brown trout and the Hands of Fame guitar. Gore's current tourism site and the district council both identify it as one of the town's defining statues, and Te Ara has long documented it among Gore's monumental landmarks.
Its sculptor and installation date are not established in the record.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Gore’s current tourism site and Gore District Council both identify the Romney ram as one of the town’s defining statues. Te Ara has long documented it among Gore’s monumental landmarks, and a geotagged Wikimedia Commons photograph provides strong site-level positioning.
ACCESS
Public Main Street landmark. The site location is based on the geotagged sculpture photograph and is site-level rather than a surveyed object coordinate; use normal central Gore parking and pedestrian access.
