Three towns sit in this stretch of the Wet Tropics — Tully, Babinda, and Innisfail — and each insists it is the soggiest place on the continent. Since 1970 they have competed for the Golden Gumboot, an award handed to whichever town records the most rain in a year. The contest is mostly a joke, but a fiercely held one. The numbers are genuinely staggering: these towns regularly drown under three to four metres of rain a year, fed by monsoon troughs and cyclones that pile moisture against the coastal ranges. Babinda has actually edged out Tully more often in recent decades — in 2019 it took the title with 3.7 metres against Tully's 3.2. The boot, in other words, may stand in the wrong town. Nobody in Tully will concede the point.

The monument opened on 10 May 2003, the work of Tully's Lions and Rotary clubs and a budget of around ninety thousand dollars in cash and donated labour. Fabricator Bryan Newell designed and built the thing in fibreglass, ribbed and creased like a real rubber boot left out in the wet. A spiral staircase climbs the interior, and the walls are hung with photographs of the district's great floods, so the ascent doubles as a history lesson in just how much water this place can swallow. At the top, a viewing platform looks out over the cane fields and the Tully Sugar Mill. It is, by any reasonable measure, the only building in Australia shaped like footwear that you are encouraged to climb inside.

Look closely at the side of the gumboot and you will find a passenger: a fibreglass green tree frog, climbing the leather as though the whole thing were just another wet log in the forest. It is a fitting mascot, because frogs love what humans here merely endure. The Wet Tropics that swaddle these towns are some of the rainiest country in Australia, where monsoon and cyclone drive moisture against the coastal ranges until the rain comes down in sheets for days. The boot belongs, too, to a great Australian tradition — the Big Things, the country's beloved gallery of oversized roadside icons, from giant prawns and pineapples to merino sheep. Most celebrate something a town is proud of. Tully's celebrates the one thing it can never escape, and decided to love instead.

In February 2011, Cyclone Yasi — one of the most powerful storms ever to strike Queensland — slammed ashore almost directly over Tully, flattening cane crops and tearing roofs from houses. The Golden Gumboot, fittingly, took its share of the punishment and was closed for repairs. The town that built a shrine to extreme weather had been mauled by it. The boot reopened early in 2012, restored through an insurance claim and a twenty-thousand-dollar donation, and re-christened by the acting Premier of Queensland. Each year the town throws a Golden Gumboot Festival, turning the region's defining hardship — relentless, ground-soaking rain — into a parade, a celebration, and a wink.