Big Deal

For centuries man has designed and built wondrous, awe inspiring monuments which cast shadows over mediocrity and survive as testament to their hard work. These creations, which seem to defy the boundaries of impossibility and laugh in the face of modern architecture, stand as paragons of that country’s unique character and greatness. Egypt has the Pyramids, Paris has the Eiffel Tower, Italy the Sistine Chapel, India’s got the Taj Mahal and the USA has the Statue of Liberty. Well, fuck you world, because Australia will see your amazing national monuments and raise you a Big Banana and a Gigantic Pineapple. Game over. Big fruit is big business in Australia. The entrepreneurial cats who started the ‘Big’ movement were the owners of a banana plantation in Northern New South Wales who thought it might be clever to build a giant banana to attract tourists. It worked. As soon as the Banana was built in 1964, tourism to the area increased sixty fold. Since then, in order that the good times continue to roll, the Banana people have built an ice skating rink and indoor snow slope on the site…Obviously! Over the past 40 years, the craze has spread like a wacky virus and there are actually more than 150 oversized icons around Australia including the Big Prawn, the Big Merino Sheep and the Big Potato. What is most strange about this phenomenon is the apparent hysteria that surrounds these eyesores. We hunted down the 90 year old current owner of the Big Banana to see if there was any possibility they were putting drugs in the water up there. VICE: Can you explain a bit about how the Big Banana was made? Kevin: A local engineer was commissioned to prepare a design to build a big banana. He visited the leading local banana grower who used to win all the prizes in the fruit shows and made him select what he thought was the perfect banana. He dissected that into one-eighth pieces and then, with a set of callipers, measured up each component, as you would an aeroplane or a boat. It has a timber frame and a cement shell with a walk through passageway and an illuminated display of the banana industry inside it. Why do you think the Big Banana is so popular? I don’t think anybody can explain that. It just captured the imagination of the public. People just simply couldn’t travel up the north coast without stopping for a banana souvenir.
Is there much competition between the designers of the big things?
If two of them knew each other I’d be very surprised. Do you think the Big Banana will ever lose its relevance? Never. It’s about to be heritage listed. In your mind, is the Big Pineapple a greater design achievement than the Banana? I don’t think so. It was a better attraction because it was more comprehensive and was built with more initial capital. Plus they had a decent little train ride there and a wide base of horticultural exhibits. But the Big Banana still stands as absolutely one of the leading big things of Australia.