Yellow Rabbit

The siting is the whole thing. Courts are among the most deliberately solemn buildings any town has, and placing a bright yellow oversized rabbit outside one is a decision somebody had to argue for. It undercuts the architecture entirely, which may be the point: a courthouse is a place people arrive at frightened, and a cheerful absurd animal at the door is not a neutral gesture.

Rabbits also carry a particular weight in central Australia. They are introduced, they reached the centre within decades of release in Victoria in the 1850s, and they did enormous damage to arid-zone vegetation and to the small native mammals that depended on it. The bilby's decline is bound up with them. A rabbit in Alice Springs is not a benign woodland creature.

Whether McLisky intended any of that is not recorded, and the record does not assert it.

Alice Springs holds several catalogue entries – the Yeperenye caterpillar, the John McDouall Stuart statue on the Hospital Lawns, the Big Hand – which makes it one of the denser concentrations of oversized public objects in the country for a town of twenty-five thousand people.

The rabbit's dimensions are not recorded here.