<
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/dec/13/roadside-colossi-the-global-allure-of-a-really-big-thing-and-the-queensland-expert-plotting-their-rise>
"Perched atop a traffic island in Banjarmasin, Indonesia, is a proboscis
monkey. Leaping from a roundabout in Mahdia, Tunisia, is a swordfish. Sprouting
from an intersection in Kundasang, Malaysia, is a cabbage.
What unites this mammal in the delta city of the jungles of Borneo, fish in the
ancient Mediterranean port and vegetable in the hill station of Sabah is size.
For these are not things of ordinary proportion – these things are big. And
they are just three of almost 10,000 big things scattered upon the face of the
Earth that now, for the first time, have been painstakingly mapped and
researched.
The woman putting those big pins on the map is the academic authority on big
things (or “larger than life roadside colossi”, in scholarly parlance), Dr Amy
Clarke. The University of the Sunshine Coast historian had for years argued –
in peer-reviewed articles, no less – for the prevailing wisdom that oversized
roadside monuments were a largely US, Canadian and Australian phenomenon.
Until one day in early 2024, while searching a stock photo website for
something entirely unrelated, she stumbled upon an image of a big spiky fruit.
“This durian, I was just staring at,” Clarke recalls. “I was excited, of
course, but I also remember thinking … ‘Oh no. Oh no’.”
Clarke has a “very visual memory” and says she recalls almost every big thing
she has ever seen. And, despite researching roadside monuments for more than a
decade, she had never seen that most pungent of fruits made big.
“I remember thinking: ‘oh God, I hope this is the only one I’ve missed’”.
It was not. By Clarke’s latest count, there are at least 23 big durians
scattered throughout countries – including Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia and
Thailand – in which it is revered as king of the fruits.
What followed that first durian was an exhaustive 11-month long internet
odyssey which would not only upend everything the expert in architectural
heritage thought she knew about big things, but how she made sense of the world
itself.
By methodically trawling through image banks in more than 72 languages and
dialects, from Albanian to Zulu, and refining her search methods beyond
translations of the term “big thing”, Clarke was able to peer beyond the
panorama of oversized objects the English-speaking internet could offer."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
