Rusty the Big Redfin – Boort

Boort, Victoria, Australia

Public art

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Current

Checked by Project Big Things · Sep 2026

This Big Thing is recorded as still being here.

An oversized redfin fish sculpture, paired with Shag on a Rock, created by sculptor Moz Moresi for Little Lake Boort.

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Rusty the Big Redfin – Boort

This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.

Approximate location · 36.118° S, 143.726° E

FIELD GUIDE

The story

Rusty is built from old farm machinery, and most of it was donated by people who live around the lake.

The sculptor Moz Moresi made him in 2015 and 2016, along with a companion piece called Shag on a Rock, for Little Lake Boort – his childhood town. The local shire commissioned the pair after buying his Dragonfly sculpture and wanting something equally distinctive for the lake shore.

The materials tell the story of how it was done. Most came from donations by locals, with additional parts sourced from scrap yards, and the build was a collaboration with the Men's Shed workshops. That is a genuinely community-made object rather than a community-funded one: the metal came out of local sheds, and local people assembled it.

Moresi works in what he calls a Steampunk style, and Rusty is crafted from a mix of agricultural machinery parts and sheet metal – so the fish is visibly made of augers, tines, plate and gears at close range while reading as a redfin from a distance.

The species is the one in the water. Redfin perch are common in Little Lake Boort, which makes the choice as local as the metal.

Boort sits in north-central Victoria between the Loddon and Murray country, and its lakes have become the town's main asset. Two sculptures on the foreshore, made of the district's own worn-out machinery by someone who grew up there, are about as close as this catalogue comes to a monument a town made of itself.

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PRACTICAL

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WHAT TO EXPECT

Rusty the Redfin is an oversized redfin fish sculpture, paired with Shag on a Rock, created by sculptor Moz Moresi. The pair stands at Little Lake Boort.

ACCESS

Rusty the Redfin stands beside Little Lake Boort on the lake's western shore, in the cluster of sports/recreation facilities (tennis club, croquet lawn, swimming pool) between the tennis clubhouse and croquet lawn. Independent OSM-derived coordinates for the Boort Tennis Club and Boort Swimming Pool corroborate this cluster's location; the stored point is an approximate midpoint of that cluster, not a sighting of the sculpture itself. Use the map-checked Nolens Park / Little Lake Boort foreshore walking anchor and approach through the public lakeside recreation area.

COMMUNITY

Visitor Log

WHAT'S NEXT

Find another Big Thing nearby

Current – limited access

Big Koran Angelfish – Pyramid Hill

Pyramid Hill, Victoria

A surviving giant Koran angelfish from the 2006 Commonwealth Games aquatic-sculpture programme at Pyramid Hill Swimming Pool.

Public art

36 km away

✓ Recommended arrival recorded

TRANSPARENCY

Sources & research

Loddon Shire Council – Nolens Park / Boort foreshore visitor site

Loddon Shire Council · recorded 2026-09-01

Current council event page confirms Nolens Park as a public event/visitor site on the Little Lake Boort foreshore and publishes a mapped site coordinate. Used as a walking arrival for Rusty the Redfin, not as the sculpture point.

Government

Moz Moresi – Rusty the Redfin & Shag on a Rock

Moz Moresi · recorded 2026-08-23

Sculptor’s current gallery documents commission, date and current Little Lake Boort placement.

Official

My Rig Adventures – Big Things Victoria

My Rig Adventures · recorded 2026-08-23

Current specialist Big Things inventory independently lists Rusty at Little Lake Boort/Federation Trail.

Community

Visit Loddon Valley – Boort Sculpture by the Lake trail

Bendigo Regional Tourism / Visit Loddon Valley · recorded 2026-09-11

Describes the 3.7 km trail between Nolens Park and Boort Rotary Park and captions 'Rusty the fish is one of the sculptures in Boort Rotary Park', which is not obviously consistent with the stored tennis-clubhouse/croquet-lawn description. Recorded as a location conflict; no coordinate given.

Tourism

What we're still checking

Open-licence image search completed 24 August 2026. No defensible reusable image with file-level commercial-use provenance was verified in the completed Commons, government/open-licence and archival/open-collection sweep.

Current attraction geography remains locality-level because Sprint 8 did not find defensible mapped/GIS/geotagged site or object geometry.

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