Australia's big things: missing, presumed undead

On 24^th February 2014 the disappearance of the Bowen's Big Mango was reported, mysteriously carted off in the dead of night. The whole affair received global attention. Images and narratives about the Big Mango burst into international cyberspace. It was internationally celebrated – in absentia.

The Big Mango was reported found late the next day. Youtube posted the news that it was publicity stunt by a fast food chain Nandos.

The disappearance of the mango was actually its dramatic reappearance online, in the simulated world of cyberspace. This does not just tell us just about the phenomenal rise of social media: it brings into questions the nature of reality itself in a digital age.

The fact that there was no 'real' theft is irrelevant. The simulation of a theft is much more convincing because it can be better orchestrated, controlled, and produced as a media spectacle. This 'theft' proved that we no longer need the 'real' to produce the virtual. As the advertising executives behind the so-called stunt know, it was the capture and broadcast of the disappearing act that was much more important than any real relocation of the 10-tonne construction.

Indeed, the 'real' now exists only to the extent that it can be reproduced as a series of images and texts for global consumption.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Australia's Big Things, once the vanguard of brash, optimistic, tourism development, are dying.

Decline of the Big Things

The Big Pineapple, opened in 1971, received Queensland's first Australian National Travel Association award. By 2009 it was in receivership, owing over half a million dollars to the ATO, finally sold to a local farmer in 2010. The Big Prawn at Ballina was destined a similar ignominious fate, only to be bought, given a $400,000 facelift, and resurrected by the Bunnings hardware chain as part of its new development in the town.

Other have been less fortunate and fallen into neglect and disrepair or become victims of vandalism. Before it was taken down in 2007 the big bull at Wauchope was constantly having its swinging testicles stolen.

This decline is global in scope. A New York Times article from 2003 reported efforts to preserve the remaining American Big Things, objects that are no longer the kitsch post-war symbol of American optimism, but more "an American penchant for commemorating …lost frontier(s)".

The development of new Big Things are now themselves exercise in media representation, such as the Big Poo in Kiama which was commissioned to generate coverage rather than to represent regional identity.

The disappearance of the 'real'

It is clear the Big Things have been unable to keep up with cultural developments in our touristic landscape.

This landscape has been re-imagined as a new, simulated, artificial world, one that outdoes the 'real' with increasingly fantastic developments. To give one celebrated example of this phenomenon, the Pirates of the Caribbean in Disneyland are much more 'pirate-like' than actually existing pirates ever were. The terminus of this trajectory was coined 'hyperreality' by the radical French social theorist Jean Baudrillard: characterised by the replacement of the real by simulacra, electronic images of a fantasies which never existed but comes to precede the real itself.

The problem is that hyperreality makes the 'real' appear as boring and banal. As soon as the simulacrum could outdo the 'real'– the 'real', as we knew it, was in jeopardy.

Unless they can dramatically reappear in cyberspace, ala The Big Mango, the writing is on the wall for Australia's Big Things.

We can identify, following Baudrillard, several phases in this disappearance of the Big Things from Australia's landscape:

Phase 1: An illusion of the real

In the beginning, the Big Things were based on a direct relationship to reality. The Big Banana was built in Coffs Harbour, the centre of a sub-tropical industry that supplied 85% of the bananas to the domestic market in the 1960s. The Big Things directly referred to this basic reality – turning local commodities into grotesque parodies of themselves. They were new and fantastic: the world's biggest banana, pineapple, prawn, potato, mango … the list goes on.

Phase 2: The absence of the real

As time moved on, the Big Things became less about the celebration of local places and more about masking their absence. Globalisation produced relocation of the industries signified by Big Things to other more competitive locations.

They became important only as symbols of a place. Tourist attractions in their own right, visitors would stop at a place simply to take their photograph next to a big thing.

The Big Things now functioned to mask the lack of local identify created by the emergence of a new global marketplace for places and their symbolic representations.

In the case of the Big Banana, Coffs Harbour was no longer the symbolic home of bananas. By 1998, 85% of the domestic market was supplied by North Queensland, a region with could grow bananas more cheaply. Bananas, through national supply chains and large supermarkets, had become ubiquitous and banal. Big thing now only pretended that unique places, based on production, still existed.

Phase 3: The disappearance of the real

Finally, even this thin pretense could no longer be maintained.The Big Banana is irrelevant, even absurd, as a representation of the 'real' Coffs Harbour.

It now makes sense not in relation to the 'real', but only in relation to other simulacrum detached from reality. The new world is not one of material objects, but of simulated realities in cyberspace. A new global system of exchangeable symbols had emerged.

The 'real' Big Banana, along with the other Big Things, has become anachronistic, a banal simulation set against a growing universe of hyperreal touristic signs and symbols, bravely trying to give meaning to our holidays. But this is now no more than a distant childish memory.

Big Things now only matter when they resurface in the hyperreal, as the theft of the Big Mango demonstrates so graphically.

The Big Things: An Epitaph

Big Things belong to a previous age. Or, more correctly, the 'real' world that they tried to eclipse with their fantastic tourism imagination has itself dissolved into a new age of hyperreality.

Trying to keep our Big Things alive in the 'real' is a futile exercise in zombie animation. They are physically present, but decaying, devoid of the healthy life force that once sustained them, relevant only as the objects of fading, nostalgic recognition.