I CURSE, SLAMMING my car door as I step out into the frigid Snowy Mountains air. “What? It’s gone!” I’ve just driven two hours on teeth-rattling back roads from Canberra to photograph Adaminaby’s Big Trout. Weighing in at 2.5 tonnes and measuring 10m in height, it’s not only one of Australia’s better-known “Big Things” (BTs), it also holds the lofty title of the world’s biggest trout.
However, where the colourful rainbow trout – which has welcomed shivering visitors to the village’s main street for the past four decades – should be, there is instead a metal tower, draped in blue plastic, which is billowing in the stiff southerly. It’s also ringed by metal fencing. But for a lack of police tape, you could be excused for thinking it was a crime scene.
Has Adaminaby’s pride and joy been trout-napped? Surely not.
Where would you hide a fish that big? Maybe she just got sick of camera-toting tourists jumping on her tail and she wriggled her way to one of the nearby streams laden with her (much smaller) namesakes?
“Perhaps you should have checked out the Big Banana [in northern New South Wales] instead,” quips my wife, still in the passenger seat. “It sure would have been warmer,” she adds, before hastily closing the window.
Suddenly, a movement near the top of the scaffolding catches my eye. A man peeks out, clad in overalls, beanie pulled low over his ears and paintbrush in hand. “Can I help you?” he asks, while trying to remove a safety mask from his face. It’s Mark Burns from Cooma Crash Repairs, who, along with workmate Chris McCullough, is undertaking “urgent repairs” to Adaminaby’s fabled big fish. Stopping for an early smoko, the pair generously invite me inside for a peek.
