Australia's big things: missing, presumed undead

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.