This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
28.63608° S, 148.86904° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
There are perhaps three hundred northern hairy-nosed wombats left, and William is a monument to that.
David Joffe and the Natureworks team built him – about two metres high and three and a half metres long – both as a tourism landmark for Thallon and to raise awareness of the species.
The northern hairy-nosed wombat is among the rarest large mammals on earth. For most of the twentieth century the entire surviving population lived in one place, Epping Forest National Park in central Queensland, having been reduced to around thirty-five animals by the 1980s. Intensive management, predator-proof fencing after dingo attacks in the 2000s, and the establishment of a second colony at St George have slowly lifted the numbers, but the species remains critically endangered and could still be lost.
St George is not far from Thallon, which gives the sculpture a genuine local basis rather than a borrowed one.
That makes William one of the most purposeful objects in this catalogue. Most Big Things advertise a crop, a business or a town. This one exists partly to make people aware of an animal almost nobody will ever see – and unlike the cassowary at Wongaling Beach or the bogong moth at Tintaldra, its subject is not merely threatened but down to a few hundred individuals.
Thallon is a very small Balonne town, and the wombat sits alongside its painted grain silos as the other half of its tourism identity.
The year William was made is not recorded here.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
