‘Fair-dinkum balls-up’: Big stink over town’s giant fish ends in repaint job

Doug Rogan is starting to rue the day he agreed to restore Adaminaby’s Big Trout, a giant 10-metre sculpture that has towered over the town at the foot of the Snowy Mountains for the past 50 years.

“This trout … everyone’s got a different opinion about what a trout looks like,” Rogan, the Canberra manager of International Conservation Services, said on Wednesday.“It’s one of those things I’m regretting putting my hand up for. Normally we do artwork conservation – paintings, sculptures, art on paper … not big pineapples or big bananas.”

“We had howling winds, which essentially made trying to do a finesse job impossible … all of the paint was being blown out of the brush sideways,” Rogan said. The council secured a $318,000 state government grant to repair and renew the Big Trout to mark its 50th anniversary. However, when it was unveiled at a community celebration on December 15, mayor Chris Hanna – who grew up driving past the fish and caught many of the real thing as a child – knew it wasn’t right.

The sculpture is a relic of the craze to build Big Things that swept through regional Australian towns in the 1960s and 1970s and was the brainchild of Adaminaby Lions Club member Leigh Stewart.Artist Andy Lomnici, a Hungarian immigrant who used to holiday and fish near Adaminaby, agreed to build the sculpture for the town, and used a frozen fish to create the model out of metal and fibreglass.

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