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Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, Australia: Big Banana and beyond

Coffs Harbour in New South Wales captures the Australian spirit in ways that other cities just can’t manage. It is the home of Australia’s first Big Thing – the Big Banana – as well as the absurdly out-of-place Clog Barn and Little Holland. David Whitley went to take a look.

The pursuit of the utterly pointless

There is much to be said for the earnest, unswerving pursuit of something utterly pointless. In a way it defines all that is good about the human condition.

No-one would have conquered Everest had it not been for someone thinking: “Well, why not?”, while the eccentrics of this world continue to push boundaries that simply do not need to be pushed.

We have people who iron shirts underwater, play Scrabble while abseiling and go hitchhiking with fridges; completely unnecessary activities one and all, but heartening examples of the triumph of creativity, invention and bloody-mindedness over dull, rational logic.

It’s a sad indictment on society that we don’t value these qualities a little higher, for if we did, Coffs Harbour would surely be a mandatory pilgrimage site.

The Big Banana – an integral part of Australian history

The trek to the major shrine is a textbook case of why you should always read the scale on maps properly. From the jetty, it doesn’t look too far away, but the endless trudging along perhaps the world’s least scenic highway suggests otherwise.

Past the flock of warehouses, the herd of tyre barns and gaggle of second hand car dealerships, then up the concrete ramp, round the corner of screaming traffic and… hang on, that’s it!

It’s not nearly as big as you’d think, and it’s nigh-on impossible to get a good picture of it with cars and trucks racing past in front, but the Big Banana is an integral part of Australian history.

Not the history that the textbooks would have us read, of Aboriginal art, convict settlement and the Eureka Stockade, naturally. No, it’s the history of the Australian character, of never taking anything too seriously and of turning just about anything into a cause for celebration. It’s the Australia that names a memorial pool after a drowned prime minister, later elects the beer-skolling world record holder and gives itself a day off for a horse race.

A small history of the Big Banana

The Big Banana was the first of a kind. Whilst nowadays, just about every Australian town has a giant fibreglass monstrosity dotting the roadside, attempting to be a tourist icon, this is the one that kicked off the trend.

It’s not the most impressive by a long stretch (that’s probably a fight between the Big Pineapple at Nambour, the Big Prawn at Ballina and the Big Merino at Goulborn), but no-one can deny that it’s a pioneering trailblazer.

This glorious monument to Australian tack was, ironically, the brainchild of an American. John Landi had come over from the US to study insects that were attacking the banana crops.

In those days, banana-growing was still the big earner in Coffs, although it wouldn’t be long before the Queenslanders muscled in and won out through sheer bulk. The fruit is still grown here, and Cyclone Larry has temporarily made it a very profitable business again, but it’s now done on a small scale.

Landi, seeing a similar thing done with pineapples in Hawaii, decided that a great, big gimmick would help him sell more fruit, and the local banana growers also saw the benefit, chipping in half the necessary funding. And in 1964, it was unveiled, the 11m long, 5m high mutant monkey snack, based on the precise measurements of the winner of the recent agricultural show.

Other attractions at the Big Banana

It’s unlikely that he realised what a craze he would start, but it has since taken on a life of its own. These days, hundreds of thousands of tourists will make the detour out there to see the Big Banana, get a snap of it, walk through it and then conclude that it probably wasn’t really worth the bother.

Alas, the whole spirit that it embodied is now a little bit lost. Realising that it has a tourist draw, endless attractions have been built up around it. There’s an ice rink, a gift shop, a jigsaw puzzle retailer, a café, and a toboggan run. It’s almost got to the stage where people will come to do something, for an actual reason, rather than just because it’s there and, well, why not?

Clog Barn and Little Holland

While every additional attraction denigrates the vital futility of the Big Banana, it is a small mercy that there is something even more pointless in Coffs Harbour. Something so random and so pathetically confined to an incredibly narrow special interest group that it has effectively grasped the giant fruit’s baton.

This is the Clog Barn and Little Holland, a little bit closer to town along the Pacific Highway. It is intended as a monument to all things Dutch, even though it has as much to do with contemporary Netherlands life as Strictly Come Dancing has to do with the Middle East peace process.

As soon as you walk in, you are surrounded by the most hideous, undesirable, nasty – and consequently, quite brilliant – tat. There are those ‘wacky’ bumper stickers that are only found funny by straw-chewing simpletons, and porcelain ornaments that would leave any mantelpiece open to caustic derision. But mainly, of course, there are clogs. Lots and lots of them.

Dutch stereotypes: clogs

Despite what the nice man behind the counter may try and convince you, absolutely no-one wears these clunky wooden shoes any more. Suggest that they do to a Dutchman, and you’ll be met with a withering stare and informed that it’s just an outdated stereotype. Well, once that Dutchman takes his finger out of the dyke and returns to his tulip-laden windmill home, you are free to revel in the complete fiction in front of you.

Three times a day, the jolly-looking chap behind the counter stops selling ice creams to demonstrate the process of how clogs are made. Whilst logic would dictate that it’s simply carving out a bit of wood with a machine, it is apparently very interesting indeed to know exactly which bit of wood, and which machine. The whole process is exceptionally painful to watch, especially if you’re the only person in the entire shop, and feel that you can’t just run away out of sheer politeness.

Little Holland: The Netherlands in miniature

If spending your days making shoes that nobody will ever wear seems an absurdly senseless pursuit, then just wait until you get outside. Through the door at the back of the barn is Little Holland, a painstaking miniature recreation of various random Dutch buildings, interspersed with tiny waterways and model train tracks.

Hedges, canals, bridges, shops and people are all painstakingly recreated at 1/20 of their normal size, and arranged on carefully manicured lawns. Apparently all the models are built on site, and are constructed over a period of months.

Every brick and tile is shaped using latex moulds, then trimmed by hand and glued on. Some of the models contain up to 50,000 pieces, and an extraordinary level of dedication is needed to put them together.

It’s no wonder that the whole building is surrounded by an electric fence. After all, it would be a tragedy if someone broke in and stole the Alkmaar cheese market, while rumour has it that the black market for scale models of Gouda’s gothic town hall is particularly strong at the moment.

The real attractions of Coffs Harbour

The delicious irony, of course, is that if there’s one place that doesn’t need such useless, but strangely endearing attractions, it is Coffs Harbour. Coffs is blessed tremendously by its position; winding hillside roads through the banana plantations to sumptuous lookouts are merely a ten minute drive out of town.

They look out on the shoreline, which is beach after beach, interspersed with imposing headlands and Muttonbird Island, possibly the windiest place in the world.

Slightly further out, there is the Solitary Islands Marine Park, arguably the best place for diving outside the Great Barrier Reef. The fish of the tropical waters meet those of the more temperate southern climes here, whilst whales regularly swim past, close to the shore, on their annual migration.

Then there’s the city itself. Slightly too big to be a sleepy seaside town, Coffs has decided not to even bother pretending it is one. There’s admirable competition amongst restaurants, and the nightlife is bustling, if not a tad notorious.

With all this on offer, it would have been understandable if the Big Banana had quietly disappeared or the Clog Barn hadn’t made it past the planning stages. That both survive and thrive is marvellous, though, and they help make Coffs a beacon of the attitude we can often forget. After all, just because it serves no purpose, has no marketplace, takes too long or seems too ridiculous, it shouldn’t stop us from having a go and seeing what happens, huh?

Coffs Harbour travel details

Coffs Harbour is 550km north of Sydney. The Big Banana and its various tag-on attractions are on the Pacific Highway just north of town. The Clog Barn is also on the Pacific Highway, though slightly closer to town.