Ballina’s Big Prawn, local fishing heritage and place branding

The Big Prawn statue erected in Ballina, on the north coast of the Australian state of New South Wales, in 1989 belongs to a genre of roadside ‘big things’ that commenced in Australia in the 1960s. The statue has come to be a prominent — if frequently contentious — landmark within the town and an icon of it for tourists. Its symbolism reflects Ballina’s status as a coastal location with a small fishing fleet and dedicated harbour and magnifies that aspect as a projection of the town to both visitors and a general social media public. As such, the Big Prawn has both a cultural ‘life of its own’ and a relationship to Australia’s national circuit of roadside big things and with other symbols of Ballina mobilised by the town council and its tourism promotion. The article provides a history of the development, prominence and impact of the Big Prawn in cultural media, its relation to cultural debates about aesthetics and heritage in Australia and the manner in which its sign can be understood to operate within a coastal location heavily dependent on tourism income.