From Little Things Big Things Grow

Ah, it’s a happening thing
And it’s happening to you
Full load and thunder
Ribbons of blue
Ice on the window
Ice in my heart
Fooling with thunder
Every time we start

It’s been raining for so long
It’s been raining for so long

Or is it any wonder
The streets are dark?
Is it any wonder
We fall apart?
Day after days strange rain falls down
All over town rain coming

It’s been raining for so long
It’s been raining for so long

Don’t you go out in the rain
Don’t go out in the pouring rain
If you go out in the rain
We’ll never have that time again

Rain (by Dragon)

“Well it’s been raining for so long”, Dragon sang to the crowd at the Robertson Potato Festival, which could not have been more fitting. (The Southern Highland News)

I am back in the Southern Highlands and what a difference a week makes!

Golden autumn sunshine and crisp blue-skied mornings turned into wet, soggy days with drizzle, rain, and torrential downpours alternating. Australia’s east coast’s fifty shades of rain. Australia’s new normal-not-normal weather. The bad weather cannot dampen our mood, however!

We are back in Robertson, home of the Big Potato, to partake in the annual Robertson Potato Festival. A hefty entrance fee of 25 dollars (which will be lifted the following day due to the rain), and we are ready for all things potato: potato soup (I tried the one served by the local Public School to help buy new furniture), potato merch (bought a classic Potato Hat), potato displays (who knew there are so many different kinds of potatoes!), and potato games (using a potato masher for the race seems like a brilliant idea!). I am a bit disappointed to miss the crowning of the Robertson Potato Queen 2024, though I don’t have a burlap dress, err Hessian, as they call it down here, anyway. I imagine it to be rather scratchy? The sacrifices we make in the name of the potato.

I snap a selfie with a potato cut-out next to the covered stage, on which the following day the legendary Australian rock band Dragon is going to perform their smash hit “Rain”. How fitting! We don’t last long at the festival – it’s hard to get comfy in the drizzle and my hair is so frizzy by now, that I will have a hard time fitting through the front door of our Airbnb. So we walk back to the town centre, across grass patches and swollen streams. Admire radiant poisonous mushrooms, enjoy the rustling of the autumn leaves, and eventually end at the town’s main attraction: the Big Potato.

Australia is home to a long list of “big things”, and Robertson’s Big Potato is only one of the approximately 150 large sculptures and structures across this country. The Big Penguin in Tasmania, The Big Merino in Golbourn (though it looked more like a gigantic Jabba the Hut and, as a student in our school pointed out correctly, you can enter the structure through its behind), the Big Kookaburra in the Hunter Valley, the Big Avocado near Byron Bay (still on my bucket list).

Big things have been part of the Australian culture since the 1960s, and you can find a big something of pretty much anything: the Big Banana in Coffs Harbour, the Big Pineapple in Queensland, the Big Koala, the Big Kangaroo, the Big Winebottle, the Big Gum Boot … you name it. There’s even the Big Bogan, which translates as your stereotypical Australian guy. And there are even plans to build the Big Chris, as in Hemsworth – your other stereotypical Australian guy.

Why the obsession with big things? Well, it’s a big country, first of all. Also, back in the day, big sculptures were built to attract tourists. “If you build it, they will come!” was the motto. No matter how bizarre – or maybe, because of the bizarre. Most of the sculptures proudly present a town’s industry, a native animal, an event in history, or some random claim to fame. Some were simply beautiful works of art or purposely cheesy to attract attention and make people smile. Or groan.

The Big Potato in Robertson is all that: tourist attraction, community effort, and definitely a piece of … art. It is big, it is brown, and to be honest, it looks like a gigantic piece of poo. Sorry Robertson, but I’m probably not the first to say this. After all, it has been called “Australia’s Shittiest Big Thing”. Though the idea behind it is noble.

Robertson is a town in the Southern Highlands, two and a half hours south of Sydney. Its high annual rainfall (not only on this weekend!) makes it an area ideal for growing potatoes. Hence the Big Potato! One day, as the legend says, a couple of bored farmers decided to build a giant concrete potato out of cement and spray it dark brown (what could possibly go wrong?). In 1977 the Big Potato was done – 10 metres long, 4 metres high, and with a little door to see the mashed-yellow insides. Plans to sell potato merch from the inside never transpired, but the Little Big Potato since has had its moments of fame: in 1995 the movie Babe was filmed in Robertson, in 2014 bought by the Australian author Melanie Tait, whose father owns the town’s supermarket (what a good daughter!), and sold it in 2022 for 970.000 dollars to a private investor. The future of the big brown lump in the middle of town is unclear – some spud-spect (sorry, I had to) the bug thing will be dismantled and the land it sits on redeveloped. A big dream of a small community coming to an end.

“From Little Things, Big Things Grow” is the title of an iconic Australian protest song I came across while reading up on big things in Australia. Written by Australian artists Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly in the late eighties, it pays tribute to Vincent Lingiari and the Gurindji Strike in 1966. The ‘little’ thing refers to Lingiari leading the Wave Hill Station walk-off in the Northern Territories, demanding Lord Vestey, a rich British meat magnate, to return the land the farm was sitting on to the Gurindji people. Eight years later Prime Minister Whitlam symbolically handed land back to the Indigenous people – a big step toward land rights and equality. From small things big things grow.

To try to make a connection between a big brown potato sculpture in a small town in the Southern Highlands and the start of the movement for Indigenous equality and land rights in Australia is more than a stretch and I am not even going to try. I couldn’t help but think, though, that in both cases, a community, any community, can turn something really small and at times even seemingly ugly or undesirable into something big and powerful.

I also could not help but think of another iconic Australian Big Thing, the Uluru. In school, we started a new science inquiry unit this week with the title “Australian Rocks and Minerals”. The students brought in big rocks and little pebbles, gemstones and chunks of muddy clay and investigated this exciting topic (I remember my son #3 wishing for nothing more than a rock tumbler when he was their age. He never got one but maybe it’s not too late and I can get one for the two of us). We talked about little rocks and big rocks in Australia, and of course, Uluru came up.

“Rising 348 meters out of the surrounding red desert plain, reaching 863 meters above sea level with a 9.4-kilometre circumference sits one of the most iconic natural landmarks in Australia. Uluru, or Ayers Rock as it was known by European settlers, is more than just an impressive natural formation. The Anangu (pronounced arn-ung-oo) are the traditional indigenous owners of Uluru, which means great pebble, and the surrounding Kata Tjuta National Park. To the traditional owners of the land, Uluru is incredibly sacred and spiritual, a living and breathing landscape in which their culture has always existed.” (https://www.wayoutback.com.au/blog/ulurus-significance-to-australian-indigenous-culture/)

I remember my visit to Uluru in 2020, just a week before Covid-19 brought everything to a halt. It felt extremely magical and special. Uluru is another iconic landmark in Australia, but on a much grander scale in terms of age and cultural significance. It strikes me that while the indigenous people of Australia, who have been here for tens of thousands of years, have Uluru as their Big Thing, the European settlers can only claim giant statues of fruit and animals as theirs.”

The big things and little things in Australia. The big things and little things in life. What I will remember most about my weekend trip to Robertson: the fields of little red-headed mushrooms, pretty and poisonous. The beautiful autumn leaf colours. The little community that could, despite the rain. The connections I made that weekend, for example, with the local artist in whose house we were staying that weekend.

On our last morning there – it was still raining outside – I found myself talking to the homeowner, the very artist responsible for the beautiful pieces around us. We were discussing the purchase of one of her paintings, a lovely rendition of the hills nearby. She then invited me to explore the various artworks she had crafted over the years, scattered throughout the house—paintings, sculptures, and sketches. Eventually, she led me to the back bedroom, where she proudly presented a chair she had crafted from leftover wood, remnants of her husband’s boatbuilding projects. The chair, with its vibrant colours and quirky design, immediately caught my eye. As I moved it to get a better look, I discovered a quote delicately stencilled into the wood:

“From little things big things grow.”