Love them or hate them, grey nomads travelling around Australia simply can’t ignore the ‘Big Things’ that sometimes dominate the road into various rural communities.
And this week marks an important anniversary in Big Thing history, with the Big Pineapple on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast celebrating its 50th anniversary.
The 16-metre tall structure was the gateway to a 162-hectare property designed to be an agricultural showpiece that would display the fruits and other produce that flourished in the tropics — but the ABC reports that it grew into something entirely different.
After it opened on August 15, 1971, – initially as Sunshine Plantation – the Big Pineapple went on to become a tourist sensation.
At its peak in the 1980s, about one million people would visit a year — enough to match the visitor numbers of Dreamworld on the Gold Coast even now.
It even attracted Prince Charles and Princess Diana while they were on their Australian tour back in 1983.
Trevor Loats, who used to drive tourist trains at the plantation, told the ABC that the number of visitors who came during the attraction’s heyday was incredible.
He remembers watching 52 buses filled with visitors pulling up in a single day after he started in 1982.
“You just basically went flat out all day,” he said. “”They would climb up the top of the Big Pineapple and look over the whole farm from there,” he said.
However, the good times didn’t last forever. With over-sized fibreglass fruit not having the pulling power it once did, the Big Pineapple went into receivership in 2009, closed in 2010. After several changes of ownership, the giant fruit eventually reopened and it has been home to the Big Pineapple Music Festival since 2013.
The property has also grown to include a high-ropes and zipline course, the Wildlife HQ zoo, and it’s now also home to a yoghurt producer and the Diablo Ginger Beer Distillery.
For all of its history, the Big Pineapple cannot claim to be Australia’s first Big Thing, that honour goes to Coffs Harbour’s Big Banana, which officially opened in December, 1964.
I went there 3 or 4 years ago. It was completely closed down. I was shocked having been there many years before when it was an exciting vibrant place to visit.
This time it was in disrepair, falling down and in a sorry state. I have to wonder what’s happening there now..
Same thing happened to me Marj. Still remember the train ride and those ice cream sundaes etc