Week 12: Why Big Roadside Things Matter

Eleanor Finch

Welcome to the show everybody! I'm Eleanor Finch, here with Simon Carver. And Simon, I want to start today with a concrete image from a tiny village in New South Wales called Robertson. Picture this: you're driving down the Illawarra Highway, and suddenly, looming out of the landscape, is a ten-metre-long, four-metre-wide concrete spud built in 1977. But recently, a local artist named Samuel Hall painted it to look like a pig.

Simon Carver

Wait, [laughs] a giant pig potato? That is brilliant. Why a pig, though? Is Robertson just exceptionally proud of its swine?

Eleanor Finch

It is actually a tribute to the film Babe. The movie was shot on family farms around Robertson, and to mark its thirtieth anniversary, the town turned their beloved Big Potato into the "Pig Potato," complete with Ferdinand the duck and those three singing mice. But the most bizarre part, Simon, is that the interior of this ten-metre structure is hollow, and the inside walls are painted to look like mashed potato.

Simon Carver

Mashed potato on the inside! [chuckles] That is a level of commitment to the bit that I deeply respect. You know, it reminds me of that classic architectural concept of "duck" architecture from Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's book, Learning From Las Vegas, back in 1972. They literally coined the term "duck" because of a duck-shaped drive-in on Long Island. A building that is its own advertisement, demanding you look at it.

Eleanor Finch

Exactly. Venturi contrasted "ducks," where the very structure is deformed into a symbolic shape, with "decorated sheds," which are just generic boxes with signs slapped on them. The Big Potato—or the Big Duck—does not need a sign. As the researcher Dr. Amy Clarke points out in her recent paper in the Journal of Material Culture, these roadside colossi warp our sense of scale. They represent what architectural theorists call a "disorienting immensity" applied to the most mundane, banal objects.

Simon Carver

Disorienting immensity. [thoughtfully] That is such a perfect way to put it. Because when you see a giant strawberry or a massive fish, it is not just big; it is fundamentally out of proportion with our reality. It shocks you out of that highway hypnosis where you're just staring at the white lines on the asphalt. It forces you to pull over and just... stare.

Eleanor Finch

Yes, and there is a critical distinction to make here between these roadside "Big Things" and high-art monuments. If you look at ancient colossi like the Sphinx of Giza, built around 2800 BCE, or even modern ones like the Statue of Liberty in 1886, they are explicitly political or religious. They are built from elite, durable materials—granite, marble, sandstone—and they are meant to project power, ideology, or territorial boundaries.

Simon Carver

Right, whereas the Robertson potato is built of... what? Concrete and steel mesh? It is cheap, modern synthetics. [chuckles] Nobody is looking at a giant fiberglass pineapple and thinking, "Ah yes, the sovereign might of the state." They're thinking, "I wonder if they sell pineapple-flavored ice cream there."

Eleanor Finch

Precisely. They align with Susan Sontag’s definition of "camp"—they are apolitical, humorous, and democratic. They are built using cheap, readily available materials like fiberglass, plastic, and aluminum. And unlike the Statue of Liberty, whose designer Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi is a household name in art history, the creators of these roadside giants are often anonymous amateurs. It is low-brow art built for commercial survival or community pride.

Simon Carver

It is folk art on a massive scale. [warmly] It's like we took the humblest, most everyday items from our cupboards and just blew them up with a shrink ray in reverse. It brings a sense of playfulness to the landscape that high-brow art simply cannot touch.

Eleanor Finch

Now, when we look at how this phenomenon developed globally, a fascinating regional divide opens up. In the United States, the post-war boom of the 1950s and 60s led to a massive wave of roadside advertising, heavily dominated by corporate franchising and mass-produced fiberglass figures. The most famous of these are the "Muffler Men."

Simon Carver

The Muffler Men! [excited] I know exactly what those are. Those giant, rigid fiberglass guys standing outside auto shops, holding a muffler or an axe, with those kind of intense, blocky faces.

Eleanor Finch

Yes! They were manufactured by a California-based company called International Fiberglass starting in the 1960s. They were generic characters—cowboys, mechanics, lumberjacks, even bikini-clad "Uniroyal Gals"—sold at trade shows to various businesses across America. By the 1970s, there were several hundred of these identical figures lining US highways. It was an industrialized, mass-produced approach to roadside attention-grabbing.

Simon Carver

So the US has these mass-produced corporate characters, but when you look at Australia or Canada, it is a completely different story, right? We do not really see legions of identical fiberglass mechanics standing by the highway in Queensland.

Eleanor Finch

No, we don't. In Australia and Canada, the trend is almost entirely community-driven and highly location-specific. Think of the Big Pineapple on the Sunshine Coast, built in 1971, which was designed to celebrate the local pineapple farming industry. Or the Big Carrot of Ohakune in New Zealand, unveiled in 1984. These are one-off, artisanal creations that celebrate the regional flora, fauna, or primary industries. They are tools for local place-making.

Simon Carver

Ohakune's Big Carrot! [laughs] That is classic. It is basically the town saying, "We grow the best carrots, and we are going to make damn sure you do not drive past without acknowledging it." It is about local pride. But there is a deeper academic theory about this, isn't there? Something about post-colonial identity?

Eleanor Finch

Yes, scholars like David Stymeist have written about "totemism" in small-town Canada, arguing that these enormous statues are a community's "declaration of its existence." In Australia, researchers like Ruth Barcan have suggested that building these Big Things might be a subconscious, reactive measure by non-Indigenous settlers to establish a physical sense of ownership over contested lands.

Simon Carver

Ah, so it is a way of anchoring yourself to the landscape. Like, "European history here is relatively short, we do not have medieval castles or ancient ruins, so we are going to build a giant concrete merino sheep to say 'we are here, this is our place.'"

Eleanor Finch

Exactly. The famous Australian artist Reg Mombassa once said exactly that—that Big Things are "like our pyramids, our temples" because the country lacks centuries-old historic buildings. And theorists Marcia Langton and Bruno David argue that the sheer abundance of wildlife and native fauna iconography in Australian popular culture represents a "taming and commodification of the natural order." It asserts dominion through representation.

Simon Carver

[thoughtfully] That is a heavy concept for a giant koala, but it makes a lot of sense. You are taking this wild, sometimes intimidating landscape and putting a giant, friendly, cartoonish version of its creatures right by the highway. It is a form of collective meaning-making. It says, we belong to this land, and this land belongs to us.

Eleanor Finch

It is a fascinating psychological transition, especially when you look at how our public perception of these objects has evolved. Back in the mid-twentieth century, critics absolutely despised them. They were seen as vulgar commercialism and visual pollution. In 1927, an architect named Robert Orr wrote an alarmist piece warning that "the noblest art" was being corrupted to advertise gasoline and cafes, ruinously cluttering the highways.

Simon Carver

Vulgar commercialism? [laughs] I mean, I get where he was coming from. If every single corner has a giant concrete hot dog, the landscape gets a bit chaotic. And didn't Lady Bird Johnson champion the Highway Beautification Act in 1965 for exactly that reason? To clear out the "neon and junk"?

Eleanor Finch

She did. The goal was to replace "endless corridors walled by neon" with "pleasing vistas." Yet, ironically, at the very same moment in the late 1960s, we see the birth of the conservation movement for these exact same objects. Lucy the Margate Elephant—that twenty-meter-tall wooden elephant built in New Jersey in 1881—gained State Historic Status in 1966 and became a National Historic Landmark in 1976.

Simon Carver

Wait, 1966? So at the same time they are passing laws to tear down roadside junk, they are designating a giant wooden elephant as a historic treasure? That is a wild contradiction.

Eleanor Finch

It shows how quickly kitsch can transform into heritage. Over time, these objects stop being seen as aggressive advertisements and start being viewed as nostalgic remnants of a simpler era—the golden age of the family car vacation before cheap air travel took over.

Simon Carver

The classic road trip. [nostalgic] Packed into the back of a station wagon with no air conditioning, desperately looking out the window for the first glimpse of the Big Merino. When we look at them now, we are not seeing commercialism; we are seeing our own childhoods. And with all the modern chaos—the pandemic, climate anxiety, economic crises—that nostalgia is incredibly powerful.

Eleanor Finch

Indeed, Dr. Clarke argues that during periods of intense societal transformation, we experience a swell in nostalgic impulses. The popularity of "Big Things" is actually rising today because they offer an uncomplicated, unthreatening distraction. They are straight-forward, cartoonish expressions of everyday life.

Simon Carver

So, what do you think, Eleanor? In a thousand years, when future archaeologists dig up the ruins of the Sunshine Coast, will they look at the Big Pineapple the same way we look at the Sphinx?

Eleanor Finch

[chuckles] Perhaps not as sacred monuments, but certainly as physical proof of what we valued: community, humor, and the sheer joy of the open road. It's a legacy built of fiberglass, but it is ours.

Simon Carver

A legacy of mashed-potato-filled giants. [warmly] I can live with that. Thanks for taking us on this journey, Eleanor. And to everyone listening, next time you pass a giant fruit on the highway, pull over. It's history in the making.

Eleanor Finch

Until next time, keep exploring.