Nobody knew it at the time, but the Big Banana invented a genre. Before it, Australian roadsides had signs and stalls; after it, they sprouted giants. The idea was irresistibly simple, a landmark so absurdly large and so specific to its town that travellers had to pull over, take a photo, and buy something. From that one yellow banana grew the Big Pineapple, the Big Merino, the Big Lobster, the Golden Guitar and, eventually, more than a thousand Big Things scattered across the continent. In 2007, Australia Post put a row of them on postage stamps, the Big Banana among them, official recognition of a craze that began as one grower's marketing hunch.

There is no pretending the Big Banana is high art, and that is precisely the point. In 2011 the Huffington Post listed it among the world's top ten pieces of folly architecture, the sort of building made for delight rather than function. Australians have always understood the joke and embraced it anyway. The Big Banana is unapologetically daft, gloriously oversized, and completely sincere about both, a monument to the idea that a roadside attraction can be worth the trip simply for being magnificently, memorably silly. Imitation followed, naturally, with a copy raised at Carnarvon in Western Australia.

What began as a single walk-through fruit grew, over six decades, into a full fun park wrapped around a working banana plantation. Today an 82-metre slide runs down the hillside, alongside a water park, a toboggan and a 4D cinema, an ice rink, mini golf, laser tag, a reptile house and escape rooms. The newest arrival is the Plantation Coaster, an alpine coaster that opened in December 2025 after years of planning. Plantation tours still explain how bananas actually grow, and the gift shop remains gloriously committed to the theme, selling banana everything to visitors who arrived, as Landi hoped all those years ago, because they simply could not drive past.

For all its kitsch, the Big Banana is a genuine landmark and a serious draw. In a single peak month, January 2014, it welcomed close to 150,000 visitors, and it has remained family-owned since Betty and John Landi and Stella and John Enveoldson opened it in 1964. It has shrugged off setbacks, a fire that destroyed an old lookout on Australia Day in 2014, a runaway monorail that ploughed into a lagoon, and kept on going. To pass through Coffs Harbour without stopping at the Big Banana feels almost like missing the town itself. Sixty years on, the gimmick has become the icon.