Snaking back from a tourist train ride in Queensland’s Sunshine Coast hinterland, a line of children and parents eagerly wait to board but Patricia Flint – or Patsy as her friends call her – is escorted straight past them.
Pineapple earrings dangle from her earlobes, a sequin pineapple is ironed on to her cardigan – a bejewelled pineapple brooch pinned to its lapel. Beside the brooch is a pineapple badge, yellowed with age, that reads: assistant retail manager.
“Patsy, is that you?” exclaims a middle-aged woman from the crowd. “I used to work for you in Tropical Treats!”
Patsy wields a walking stick in one hand, with her other she holds on to Pam Thomas, who wears a white jacket emblazoned with golden pineapples. Gold-hued rings crowd Pam’s fingers, gold bracelets jangle on her wrists and gold rims her sunglasses. She flashes a golden badge at the two young men operating the train. It has a pineapple on it too and the words: gold pass.
Patsy and Pam board the last carriage clutching a photograph of the late Diana, Princess of Wales and then-Prince Charles taken on this very train in 1983. As the train rattles through an empty paddock towards a patch of subtropical rainforest, an unmistakable outline emerges on the hilltop above them – a 16-metre steel-framed fibreglass pineapple.
Patsy began working at the Sunshine Plantation, a working pineapple farm converted into a pioneering agritourism operation, just before it opened the Big Pineapple in 1971. She stayed for 22 years and returned regularly in retirement.
Patsy was a central character during the glory days of the 1970s and 80s when the Big Pineapple boldly claimed to host more than one million visitors a year and crowned itself Australia’s No 1 tourist attraction.
Those were the days when its 350 staff worked hard to maintain the pineapple plantation and serve famously decadent parfaits layered in lashes of whipped cream, macadamia nuts, tropical fruit and ice-cream.
Patsy was there in the 1990s when a bypass abruptly cut the giant pineapple off from its main traffic route, the Bruce Highway. She bore witness to a decade of decline that followed the monument’s sale to a Sydney businessman. And she saw the pineapple’s paint fade after its darkest day on 13 October 2010, when staff arrived to find its gate locked and the once must-see attraction abandoned.
After 14 years of big promises, legal battles and a Game of Thrones’ style ownership jostle, the Big Pineapple finally reopened in June. Patsy, too, has returned, at the age of 93, for another ride around the track.
When asked what this oversized tropical fruit meant to people like her and Patsy, Pam – who sold parfaits and paintings, jewellery and gemstones for two decades at the pineapple – doesn’t hesitate to answer.
“Everything,” she says. “I still dream about this place. A lot of people do. It was just a magical time.”
In Pam’s dreams, she wears a beautiful muu-muu and sells colourful jams.
But it is not just over its former workers that this roadside attraction maintains its peculiar hold. In 2006 the National Trust of Queensland unveiled a list of state icons – alongside the Great Barrier Reef and the Gabba was the Big Pineapple. The year after, it was one of five big things celebrated on Australia Post stamps. In 2009 it was heritage listed. Last year the Royal Australian Mint stamped its likeness on a $1 coin.
For generations of Australians the Big Pineapple conjures up memories of road trips to the sunshine state, of birthday parties and weddings, of train rides and ice-cream.
“How do you stuff up train rides and ice-cream?” asks journalist Kerry Brown who is still haunted by the demise of the attraction, which prompted her to write a book about the pineapple’s history.
Brown has spent most of her life in the shadow of the pineapple and, when she started interviewing the Pams and Patsys of the area, knew she “just had to write this book”.
“People would cry,” she says when recalling their days at the pineapple. “Happy tears.”
What can explain the emotive power of a roadside attraction like the pineapple?
The historian and heritage consultant Amy Clarke moved with her family to Queensland when she was 11 and was soon taken on a trip to the Big Pineapple.
“It was just one of those things you did as a family when you moved to Queensland,” she says. “You went and saw the Big Pineapple. And the Big Pineapple is everything that you imagine Queensland is. Everything is bigger here.”
Several decades on, Clarke, now an academic authority on big things, has identified multiple criteria that make them successful: colossal size, siting in a landscape, longevity and becoming “part of the cultural shorthand of a region”.
“The Big Pineapple is doing all of that,” the University of the Sunshine Coast senior lecturer says. “It is the gold standard of a big thing.”
And while Australia’s big thing phenomenon may be associated with the postwar rise of the car, her research indicates it could also tap into much more ancient parts of our psyche.
For millennia, Clarke writes, “civilizations have constructed giant statuary to demarcate boundaries” – between “civilization” and “barbarism”, life and afterlife, human and divine. Big things have long defined here from there. The Colossus of Rhodes, the Sphinx of Giza, the Statue of Liberty, all were loaded with meaning much larger than their physical size, as Clarke has discussed in academic publications.
Which is perhaps what Reg Mombassa – the legendary artist behind Mambo’s loud shirts and illustrator of the “big thing” postage stamps – was tapping into when he drew the figure of a man standing at the base of the pineapple and beside a blue V8 Holden station wagon with his hands in the air, as if in prayer.
“Yeah that’s right,” Mombassa says. “I would have rendered it as a quasi-religious object. It is probably the closest thing Australia has. Places like Brazil have enormous statues of Jesus – we have big pineapples and potatoes and lobsters.”
But will the cult of the pineapple continue?
Today, the pineapple is a curious site next to a regional road with a serviceable cafe and a train ride. It takes a bit of imagination to reconcile what stands now with the raw emotive power of its past.
But the new owner, Peter Kendall, is restoring his big new asset, in stages. Workers are inside the belly of the oversized fruit, so that visitors can once again clamber to the viewing platform nestled in its spiky top. There are plans to develop a pineapple plantation on the site, reopen the main building – now derelict – add water slides and glamping and, perhaps most importantly, bring back the parfaits.
Kendall declines an interview, preferring to wait until the attraction is restored, which he has said could take decades. But Brown is encouraged by what she has seen so far.
Clarke has her own suggestion for a future use of Queensland’s favourite big thing. It came to her after watching the Paris Olympics and wondering how Brisbane might match the Eiffel Tower when the Queensland capital hosts the games in 2032.
“What better building have we got to offer the world than the Big Pineapple?”
