Should Bendigo have a Big “Thing”? Y’know, like a pineapple, a lobster, a koala, sheep, bulls like so many other Australian places.
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We’re famous around the globe for our fondness of big things. Even Australians who love them smile at the weirdness of the practice.
DTM counted at least 214 Big Things from cockroaches to slide rules. There are at least three Big Ned Kelly sites including one in Ballarat and in Queensland, which, as far as we know, Ned never visited.
The oddest must be the thing in North Arm Cove in NSW. It’s called The Big Ayers Rock. It’s a mere one-40th of the size of the real one. A small big thing? It was built by some outback filmmakers but if you wanted to know why, you’d have to (ahem) ask the Leyland Brothers.
Sure, Bendigo has the Big Hole In The Ground, the many kilometres of shafts and tunnels from the historic gold mining days. When you see three-dimensional images it looks like an upside-down image of New York’s Manhattan skyline.
But … but, it lacks the necessary quota of kitsch to really stand out as a national Big Thing.
A Down The Mall conversation came up with an idea we’ve already partly created: The Big Cheese.
See, on one side of the CBD we have The Big Cheese Grater, otherwise known as the new multi-storey car park.
And now on the other side, builders Hansen Yuncken have wrapped much of the old Bendigo TAFE in McCrae Street in vivid yellow shade cloth, where it looks like a three-storey block of cheddar.
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It’s odd what you can discover when you start looking into these things.
We couldn’t find out if any Australian place had claimed The Big Cheese. The first one which came up in a quick search was actually a company which made rodent traps.
But it’s right to have The Big Cheese because of its odd word and slang origins. It’s a term for someone important or powerful, and the reason for that is that it comes from a Middle Eastern term “the real chiz” – the real thing. So, The Big Cheese is THE Big Thing.
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Coincidentally, workers at The Big Cheese rodent trap company should have Saturday off. I swear this is an actual thing: it’s world Rat Catchers’ Day, celebrating the day in 1284 – according to the Brothers Grimm – when the Pied Piper made off with the children of Hamelin in Germany.
If that’s not enough, it’s also World Pi Approximation Day. People really do make, eat and throw pies on this day, but the purists say it should happen on March 14, or 3/14 as the Americans put it, the first three digits of the mathematical value Pi.
