This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 32.5670° S, 151.1627° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Thirty tonnes of sundial in a park by the Hunter River, and it still tells the time.
The Singleton sundial was completed in 1987 as part of the town's bicentennial riverfront project, standing just under eight metres high in Rose Point Park. Singleton Council records it as still considered the largest sundial in the Southern Hemisphere.
That phrasing matters, and this catalogue has deliberately adopted it. The object has often been called the world's biggest sundial, a claim that is difficult to sustain and easy to disprove; the hemispheric claim is both defensible and sourced, and the record uses it rather than repeating the larger one.
A sundial at this scale is a genuine instrument rather than an ornament. The gnomon has to be aligned to true north and inclined to the local latitude, the hour lines have to be calculated for that specific position on the earth, and none of it can be copied from elsewhere. A thirty-tonne monolith set to the wrong angle would be a very large piece of decorative stone.
That puts it with the working objects in this collection – the eleven-metre Alexandra clock on its Central Otago hillside, the Esperance Stonehenge with its recalculated solstice alignments. All three do something rather than depict something.
Rose Point Park sits by the river and is described as the gateway to the largest sporting area in the region.
No source located gives the builder.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Singleton Council records the sundial as just under eight metres high, about 30 tonnes, and still considered the largest sundial in the Southern Hemisphere. The project avoids the older candidate name's unqualified 'world's biggest' claim.
ACCESS
Navigate to Rose Point Park at the southern end of Ryan Avenue and use the park access and parking. The sundial is a free outdoor attraction within the riverside recreation precinct.
