Giant Yabby Puts Tiny Windorah on the Tourist Map

A 4.6-metre yabby now stands on Albert Street in Windorah, a western Queensland town of 100 people. A ribbon-cutting ceremony unveiled the $13,000 state-funded sculpture. The town sits 1,200 kilometres north-west of Brisbane. For a community that size, so far out, public money for something that puts it on the map isn't a luxury. It's a bid to keep the local economy breathing.

Barcoo Shire Mayor Sally O'Neil made the case plainly. She hopes the statue will draw travellers off the road and persuade them to stay longer. "Hopefully it'll pull the tourists up and they may hang around an extra day ... it's good for economic development of the communities out west," she said.

Why a Crustacean?

The yabby isn't a random choice. It represents the town. O'Neil said Windorah is best known for its "international yabby races," a fixture on its annual social calendar. The creatures also thrive in the surrounding country. "[At] Cooper Creek ... you will pull up, go fishing, and you're bound to get a yabby or two, or five or more," she said.

The statue puts that local identity where passing drivers can see it. Small towns far from the coast rarely get a second look without a hook, and the state funded this one at $13,000.

Backing Local Artists

Toowoomba artist Jobella Bennett built the sculpture from bird wire and sheet metal over three months. It's the largest work she has made. She took the commission after she began hosting classes in the central west. "I got rung up and they [the council] were like, 'Could you make a yabby?'" she said. "And I was like, 'Yeah, how big?'" "And they were like, 'As big as you can make it.'"

Before starting, Bennett researched yabbies. "It's my first big project, I learned a lot," she said, adding that she hopes to make more "big things." She also spoke about who gets paid for this kind of work. "There's so many amazing artists out there and it's really nice that councils or the communities or whoever's organised it is actually backing artists," she said.

That matters. Public commissions can give working artists steady, meaningful work outside the big cities, and regional councils often write the cheques.

A Community Project, Not a Corporate One

The yabby joins a familiar family of Australian roadside attractions: Ballina's big prawn, Cardwell's big crab, Bowen's big mango, Tully's big gumboot and Woombye's big pineapple. University of the Sunshine Coast history lecturer Amy Clarke said "big things" also exist in Canada and the United States, but Australia keeps building more. "Australia is still pedal to the floor, kind of, 'Let's build as many of them as we can,'" she said.

Clarke sharply contrasted Australia's approach with the American one. Many statues in the United States, she said, have a commercial incentive. Australian ones tend to reflect collective effort. "And it is often the case that it is really a kind of group project," she said, describing chambers of commerce, local councils or charities working together to celebrate a town and attract visitors.

The trend began in the 1960s and has become more official over time. "We've now seen over time a professionalisation of big things," Clarke said. Specialist companies and professional fibreglass artists now build these giant objects. "And you can tell as well when you look at them that they're intended to be quite artistic," she added.

Why This Matters: Windorah's yabby is a small story with a larger point about how remote communities survive. A town of 100 can't generate its own tourism infrastructure, so a $13,000 public grant becomes a rare lever for local economic development. The project also paid a regional artist for three months of skilled work and fits a model Clarke describes as collective, council-and-charity-driven rather than purely commercial. Whether a statue can persuade travellers to stay an extra day remains to be seen. But the investment shows what modest, targeted public funding can do for places that markets alone tend to overlook, and keeps both money and creative work in the bush.