How great the art

FOR DECADES, PARTS of rural Australia have been identified, often in a playful way, with ‘big things’. You know, those oversized pieces of fruit – the banana, pineapple and the like – proclaiming a town or region’s claim to fame. Perhaps you’ve seen the giant merino ram, Ned Kelly, a well-configured bull, jumping trout or rampant crustacean.

Depending on your taste, you might have admired these fibreglass, ferrocement or fabricated metal colossi as exuberant naive folk art, or dismissed them as tawdry, tourist-trapping kitsch. But whatever the response such expressions of local identity have provoked, there is no doubt big things have secured a particular place in our cultural landscape. Across the country, keen travellers often seek out, and affectionately tick off, the next big thing as they ply Australia’s tourist trails.

Now, three-dimensional big things face spectacular artistic competition for the traveller’s attention. A worldwide movement around urban street art – the adornment of building facades and public spaces with colourful, arresting and sometimes politically provocative murals – has reached the bush. And, as the popularity of mural painting spreads, monumental works now adorn previously bare and even defunct walls of rural industry across Australia.

In 2015 two international artists painted murals at either end of the CBH Group’s grain silo complex at Northam in Western Australia’s wheatbelt. American Alex Brewer (aka HENSE) worked in broad abstract fields of bold colour, while Welsh-born Phlegm created a fantasy world of monochrome cartoon figures and flying machines. Despite being vastly contrasting creative expressions, the results were spectacular and entirely complementary. The seeds of a nationwide movement were planted – no pun intended. With just one silo complex so effectively rendered, there were obviously any number of blank ‘canvases’ of concrete and steel out there, ready