Everyone’s Shitting On Australia’s Worst Tourist Attraction: Robertson’s Big Potato
The monument was recently voted 'Australia's Shittiest Big Thing'.
When was it, do you think, when every small Australian town decided they needed something big?
Judging from the Wikipedia entries of our most famous big things, such as The Big Banana and The Big Stubbie, it looks like the sensation of small towns building tributes to their exports and local curiosities kicked off in the 1970s.
However, due to similarities of Australia’s produce export market, I’d imagine that there was a gold rush of sorts between towns to build their ‘big thing’ first. Even if Ballina and Lennox Head were both known for their local seafood, you couldn’t possibly allow two ‘Big Prawns’ in the same state! That would be ridiculous!
Following that logic, if the most obvious signifier for your town was taken, I can imagine the quiet panic that would ensnare council planning boards keen on securing the second-most appropriate icon for their area. Failing that, there would be a desperate race just to get SOMETHING up! Anything! So long as it was aesthetically pleasing and relatively easy to build — like say ‘a giant apple’ or ‘big orange’ — and hadn’t already been built by someone else.
That — I imagine — is how the small town of Robertson ended up with The Big Potato.
The Big Potato in Robertson, NSW. Apparently the doors were blocked off because people were using it as a toilet pic.twitter.com/Xc1rRgdY3T
— Don Arthur (@donattroppo) December 8, 2019
Ten metres long and four metres wide, wrought from reinforced concrete, and spray-painted an unfortunate shade of brown, the fine people from Robertson council had surely run out of other options. Built back in the ’70s, the spud supposedly represents the cultivation of the North American Sebago, in which several farmers in Robertson are engaged in.
The poor locals could have probably predicted how terribly a ‘big potato’ would reflect on the area, but Robertson was stuck. The only other export the town was also known for — delicious artisan cheese — had already been claimed by the south coast town of Bodella, who had managed to build their tribute, ‘The Big Cheese’ decades earlier.
This week, Robertson has officially been named and shamed for its starchy icon. The Big Potato managed to beat Kalgoorlie’s icon ‘The World’s Tallest Bin’ to be awarded Australia’s Shittiest Big Thing in a national survey on Facebook. Claiming 62.3 percent of the popular vote, the comment section is rife with people making ban potato puns as they congratulated Robertson for the win.
But to me, I’ll always remember The Big Potato as a quaint effigy of bad impressions. Gone are Robertson’s verdant green paddocks and lush rainforests — all replaced by the frame of a big brown concrete spud.