Killing Snowmen: Big Things and Rural Australia’s Existential Crises

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In the mid-1980s my father took the Alpine Shire to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal to contest the proposed construction of a seventeen-metre-high concrete snowman. The Big Snowman was part of an Australian post Second World War tradition of constructing big kitsch monuments in small townships. These massive sculptures had been inherited from a similar trend in the United States and were designed to put communities on the tourist map by stopping the passing car in awe. Ultimately, my father was successful, and the Big Snowman was never built. Nonetheless, from the 1960s an estimated 350 Big Things were installed across Australia and around 150 still line Australian rural roadsides. This paper takes a mixed-method approach—utilising a family archive of documents related to the Big Snowman controversy, memory, and performance-based mobile fieldwork to ask what Big Things tell us about Australian national identity. Written in an auto-ethnographic style in conversation with mobilities, postcolonial, settler-colonial and feminist theory, this experimental paper articulates how elements of the “mechanic complex” that have been inherited from different countries can have complex site-specific meaning and impacts.