Australia's big things: missing, presumed undead

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.