Wal – Giant Murray Cod

Giving him a name is the choice that matters. Wal, not the Big Cod – which puts him with Colin the Lyons turtle, Clancy at Kirwan, Morty at Queanbeyan and Rambo at Goulburn in the small group of Big Things treated as individuals. Named objects get talked about; described ones get photographed.

Being built for climbing is rarer still. Almost everything in this catalogue is structurally decorative, meant to be admired from a distance and quietly not touched. A sculpture engineered to carry the weight of children on a daily farm tour is doing a different job, and recycled material makes it a demonstration as well as a fish.

The cod itself is the largest freshwater fish in Australia, historically well over a metre and a half, long-lived, and now threatened through river regulation, cold-water dam releases and the loss of the submerged timber it shelters under. A farm that breeds them and a sculpture children climb are both, in their way, arguments for keeping the species around.

This is the catalogue's third giant Murray cod, after Swan Hill's film prop and Tocumwal's 1968 Big Fish.

No answer exists for its age and the hand behind it.