‘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.

The last business to give the fish a once-over was an auto repair shop in Cooma, Rogan says, but “it ran a mile” when asked to do the work again. Now he knows why.

The zjooshed-up Big Trout, revealed in all its hot-pink glory just before Christmas last year, elicited a passionate response from locals and anglers.

“Holy crap, that is bad,” one person opined on social media.

“A fair dinkum balls-up there,” wrote another.

“Even the big potato at Robertson, NSW, looks more realistic than that fish.”

Some spoke out in support of the sculpture, especially visitors, who liked its bright and happy vibe. But the furious cacophony from naysayers, some of whom compared the trout to Spain’s Monkey Christ fresco fiasco, resulted in Snowy Monaro Regional Council organising to repaint the trout to give it a more realistic look – work which began this week under Rogan’s supervision.

“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.”

He said his restoration team last year had been trying to return the trout to its most recent colour scheme after spending weeks fixing the internal structure of the fish, which had fallen into disrepair.

The weather had made painting challenging because the workers hadn’t been able to use spray paint and by the time they finished fixing the trout’s structure, they only a few days left to paint it.

“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.

“We’re talking 50-knot winds when up the top of the trout on those days. You can’t spray [paint] in that sort of weather.

“Every time it has been painted – which has happened a lot – some people are happy and some aren’t. This one seems to have caused more controversy than any other time.”

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.

“It was my first official opening [as mayor],” he said. “As soon as we saw it, the general manager and I just looked at each other and went, ‘We have got to get this fixed.’

“There was a lot more pink on it. The fins were all pink. The previous trout wasn’t pink.

“It was just an artist’s impression of what he thought a trout would look like, but what we should have done was speak to the community before we painted it.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott with the Big Trout in Adaminaby during the Pollie Pedal bike ride in April 2017.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“Fishermen want to drive past and make sure it’s a trout that looks like a trout.”

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.

The Big Trout in Adaminaby back when it was green in 1973.Credit: yoursaysnowymonaro.com.au

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.

Earlier this year, the council let the public vote on a new colour scheme for the Big Trout and its two online polls drew more than 2600 responses – impressive given Adaminaby is home to only 350 people.

Hanna said the paint job had drawn more public opinion than any other issue to have faced the region during his time on council. “When we were putting people’s rates up [last year], we didn’t come close to that number of submissions,” he said of the online trout vote.

“It’s put Adaminaby back on its map.”

Rogan hopes the new paint job will ensure the Big Trout once again resembles the frozen fish Lomnici held in his hands 50 years ago.

“The Big Banana doesn’t necessarily look like an actual banana, whereas this is meant to look like an actual trout … not some stylised trout,” Rogan says of Trout 2.0.

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