Before we begin, we need to point out that this is absolutely not an April Fool’s joke. Believe us. We checked. Like, five times.
Australia. Glorious sunburnt country. Land of sweeping plains. Ragged mountain ranges. Droughts, and flooding rains.
And a land who celebrates the minutiae of our great nation by building a bloody big fuck-off version of stuff for people to gawk at on the sides of highways.
But a small town in New South Wales may well be about to trump us all. Forget the Big Banana or the Big Pineapple. To hell with the Big Merino or the Big Prawn. And, shit, you can even forget the Big Golden Guitar or the Big Spud.
They’re all about to be left in the dust, as the small town of Nyngan erects the king of them all.
THE BIG BOGAN.
Plans are well underway by a group of locals keen to give the town a shot in the arm through the magic of tourism to erect a statue to our most sacred of native fauna with a towering visage of toothless wonder for visitors to stop and cop a butcher’s at and maybe snap off a few choice Kodak moments.
The proposed steel statue will stand at 3.6 metres tall and feature a figure adorned in a singlet, shorts, trucker cap and thongs, holding a fishing rod and standing next to an Esky.
The idea was the brainchild of Reverend Graham McLeod of Nyngan’s St. Mark’s Anglican Church, who sketched the rough idea and presented it to Shire council members, who reacted with great enthusiasm at the idea.
‘Course it’s worth pointing out here that Nyngan happens to reside within the Bogan Shire, and I swear to you all – hand on heart – that I absolutely am not making this up. The statue is intended as a nod to the Shire’s history, whilst “celebrating” the more popular image the word has come to represent. Thus spoke the Good Reverend:
“Firstly I thanked the mayor for not pooh-poohing the idea straight away, fascinatingly none of them objected. They were very much of the opinion ‘let’s give this a go’.”
“I thought, we better latch onto The Big Bogan. What would happen if Logan in Queensland decided they wanted to build the ‘Logan from Bogan’ and beat us to it?”
“It’s about tourist potential and place recognition. Nyngan is a place where you leave Dubbo of a morning and stop for morning tea. This gives people another reason to stop. Actually, I’m even hoping we can attract people from overseas to come and sit with The Big Bogan.”
But, like all things that should be nice and good, the Big Bogan is not without its bureaucratic, pointless PC nonsense. How, you ask?
“I decided to leave out the stubby holder and cigarette.”
Oh come ON, Reverend McLeod. For God’s sake. What else?
“A couple of councillors put forward the ideas of giving him a tattoo or having a snake on the ground near him, so we might consider those.”
Well, yeah. Alright. That’s… that’s a bit better *I suppose*.
The council, for their part, are being a big bunch of legends about the whole thing and are getting well on board with the idea. Bogan Shire Mayor Ray Donald said of the project,
“Of course, we didn’t want Nyngan to be thought of as “a town full of bogans” but the term is a frequently used one, and where better in Australia could we have The Big Bogan than on the banks of the Bogan River, in Bogan Shire?”
Fuckin’ ay, Ray. Fuckin’ ay.
