The Big Pineapple is a heritage-listed tourist attraction at Nambour Connection Road, Woombye, Sunshine Coast Region, Queensland, Australia. It was designed by Peddle Thorp and Harvey, Paul Luff, and Gary Smallcombe and Associates. It is also known as Sunshine Plantation. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 6 March 2009.
The 2-level Big Pineapple is high and was originally opened on 15 August 1971. It is situated on a site.
Under new ownership the owners are facilitating new attractions such as the Big Pineapple Music Festival and the Big Pineapple was also selected to host Midnight Oil within their reunion concert series in 2017. The owners are also embarking on a master planning process through community consultation to further rejuvenate the Big Pineapple experience, with a range of new attractions and services proposed.
History
The former Sunshine Plantation tourist attraction, now known as The Big Pineapple, is located on the north side of the Nambour Connection Road (former Bruce Highway), just to the west of the current Bruce Highway. It holds a fond place in the memories of many domestic and overseas tourists who drove or were driven north of Brisbane on holiday road trips after 1971. Apart from the iconic value of the Big Pineapple structure itself, as a roadside attraction of the Big Thing variety, the entire complex, with its retail and restaurant spaces, train ride and Nutmobile, crops, rainforest, Macadamia Nut Factory, Big Macadamia, Tomorrow's Harvest greenhouse, Farm Show, Wildlife Gardens, and Animal Nursery, represents an early attempt at agri-tourism in Queensland.
Background
Big Things are large advertising objects, usually in the form of the item they are advertising, and are loosely defined as being at least twice the size of the object they represent and at least twice human size. Big Things have been called outdoor cultural objects which serve to construct and assert the identity of a town or area, and they have also been described as one of Australia's most distinctive home-grown forms of folk art. (The term "outdoor cultural object" was coined in the 2004 publication "Monumental Queensland: Signposts on a Cultural Landscape" by Lisanne Gibson and Joanna Besley.) The Big Pineapple appears to be the most widely recognised Big Thing in Queensland.
The first pineapple plants in Queensland were landed at the new Redcliffe settlement by the brig Amity in 1824, and in 1829 the Colonial Botanist Charles Fraser listed 34 pineapple plants amongst the crops flourishing in the 15-acre government garden at Brisbane that he had laid out in 1828. In the 1870s and 1880s experiments in pineapple growing occurred in what would become the Maroochy Shire, but the first commercial pineapple crop in the area was at Thomas Davey's Woombye farm in 1895.
The area between the Mooloolah and Maroochy Rivers was closed to settlement prior to 1860 as part of a Reserve proclaimed by Governor George Gipps in 1842. Gipp's proclamation was rescinded by the Crown Lands Alienation Act 1860, which allowed for post-survey selection, and timber-getting licenses. In the early 1860s Edmund Lander leased the Mooloolah Back Plains run around the future site of Nambour, and timber getters started to exploit the area, working inland along waterways. The Alienation of Crown Lands Act 1868 also stimulated settlement, and by 1871 the census recorded 104 people living and working in the Maroochy region, although only 31 were permanent settlers. At this time there were about under pineapples in Queensland, mostly near Brisbane.
Maroochy developed as a region of small farms, and by the mid-1880s the region had 116 people employed in mixed farming, 70 in sugar, 52 in timber, and only 15 in grazing. The Maroochy Divisional Board was created in 1890 (becoming the Maroochy Shire in 1902), and would develop into Queensland's largest fruit growing area between the 1880s and 1915, thanks to its climate and rainfall, with bananas being grown from the 1880s, and pineapples from the 1890s. It was possible for small farmers to make a living out of pineapples as thousands of plants could be cultivated in each acre. Other crops grown in the Maroochy Shire included coffee, ginger, strawberries and citrus. Dairy farming also played an important part in the local economy from the 1890s.