The giant fruit was the idea of an unlikely pair. Bill Taylor had spent two decades at the United Nations in New York, where he ran the Development Finance Section; his wife Lyn worked there as an interior designer. They came home to Australia in 1970, and in January 1971 their family bought a 23-hectare pineapple farm southeast of Woombye. The plan was agri-tourism, then a novel idea: let visitors see where their food came from, ride a little train through the crops, eat the produce, and buy it on the way out. On 15 August 1971, the Sunshine Plantation opened, crowned by its two-storey fibreglass pineapple. The Maroochy Shire chairman drove a gold spike into the new train line to mark the day.

That train was no toy. The Plantation cane train runs on a one-kilometre, two-foot-gauge track that still holds the steepest incline and sharpest bend of any passenger railway in Queensland. Visitors climbed aboard to trundle past pineapple rows and rainforest while a guide explained the crops. Over the years the complex grew far beyond the fruit: a Nutmobile tour, a Macadamia Nut Factory, a second giant, the 16-metre Big Macadamia, a hydroponics greenhouse called Tomorrow's Harvest, wildlife gardens and an animal nursery. At its peak the Sunshine Plantation drew around a million visitors a year, making it one of the great stops on the long family drive north out of Brisbane.

On 12 April 1983, the train carried its most famous passengers. Prince Charles and Princess Diana, midway through their Australian tour, rode the little railway through the plantation while more than 10,000 people crowded in to catch a glimpse of them. The carriage they sat in was fitted with a plaque to mark the visit, then quietly slipped out of public view as the decades passed. It spent some twenty years in storage and was all but forgotten until a local enthusiast, hunting through photographs of the royal day, went looking for it. The carriage was found, restored, and unveiled again in 2021 as part of the Big Pineapple's fiftieth-birthday celebrations, royal plaque and all.

The Big Pineapple belongs to a peculiarly Australian tradition. By one 2004 count there were 118 Big Things, or clusters of them, scattered across the country, oversized fruit, animals and objects built to lure drivers off the road. Queensland led the nation with 41, ahead of New South Wales. Most were pure advertising, hauling travellers toward a shop or a service station. Only a handful were structures you could actually enter, and the Big Pineapple was one of them, sharing that distinction with its neighbour the Big Macadamia. Of all of them, the pineapple at Woombye became the best known in the state, an icon recognised far beyond the highway it was built to interrupt.

Not every chapter has been sunny. The 1980s heyday faded; the crowds thinned, attractions closed, and the Tomorrow's Harvest greenhouse and the Big Macadamia's night-time displays went dark. In May 2021 the historic cane train suffered an indignity worthy of a tall tale: someone reportedly on a brewery tour pulled it from its storage tunnel without permission, took it for a spin, and derailed it. A 22-year-old was charged and ordered to pay for the damage. Workers rebuilt the locomotive, replaced 700 sleepers and the wrecked track, and the train rolled again in 2024. New owners have leaned into music festivals, walking trails and the slow work of rejuvenation, betting that a giant pineapple still has the pull to make people stop, look up, and climb the stairs.