Australia's first Big Thing

Witness History

BBC

Society & Culture, Personal Journals, History

4.5 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2026

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1963, a giant Scotsman sculpture appeared outside the Scotty Motel in Adelaide, in South Australia. A banana, a koala, and even a potato soon followed, paving the way for the country’s beloved Big Things - one of Australia’s quirkiest cultural phenomena.

Paul Kelly was the artist behind both the Big Scotsman and the equally iconic Big Lobster. He and his daughter, Christobel Kelly, tell Stefania Gozzer how each sculpture came to life.

Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by and curious about the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there.

For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more.

Recent episodes explore everything from how the Excel spreadsheet was developed, the creation of cartoon rabbit Miffy and how the sound barrier was broken.

We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: the moment Reagan and Gorbachev met in Geneva, Haitian singer Emerante de Pradines’ life and Omar Sharif’s legendary movie entrance in Lawrence of Arabia.

You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, like the invention of a stent which has saved lives around the world; the birth of the G7; and the meeting of Maldives’ ministers underwater. We cover everything from World War Two and Cold War stories to Black History Month and our journeys into space.

(Photo: The Big Scotsman. Credit: Paul Kelly's archive)

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.
0:07.2	Things just swirling around my head.
0:09.6	Am I really the product of this?
0:12.1	Astonishing secrets uncovered by at-home DNA tests.
0:17.0	Little did I know what more was to come.
0:19.5	I'm Jenny Clemen, and in the new series of The Gift, we'll hear more stories emerging out of the ever-expanding global DNA database. They did know that I was different. You had kids together. Yeah. Then you met. Then we met. The Gift. Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:43.6	Hello.
0:44.7	Welcome to Witness History with me, Stefania Goetzer.
0:48.3	Now, if this is one of your favorite podcasts already, you can skip ahead a little bit.
0:53.4	But if you're listening for the very first
0:55.4	time, welcome. I want to tell you a bit more about us. We look at a moment in history told by
1:01.9	the people who were there. We use incredible archive and hear amazing stories. New nine-minute
1:08.8	episodes drop every weekday. So if that sounds like your thing, hit
1:13.8	subscribe wherever you get your BBC podcasts and turn on your notifications so you never miss an
1:20.3	episode. But for now, let's go to the story. I'm taking you back to the 1960s, when an artist received a unique commission that would end up sparking a nationwide phenomenon in Australia.
1:36.6	It's 1963 and the very first big thing has appeared beside a road in South Australia.
1:43.8	If you've been down under, you'll know
1:45.9	exactly what I mean. But if you haven't, big things are, well, a big thing in Australia.
1:53.5	There are giant sculptures of people, animals, or pretty much anything you can imagine.
1:59.4	There are massive books drawing visitors to a library,
2:02.9	a huge bicycle outside a recycling centre,
2:06.0	and an oversized koala with its own gift shop.
	...

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