Bunnings shells out for Big Prawn site, but has no plans for Ballina icon's renovation
The future of the Big Prawn at Ballina is now very much in play following the purchase of the site by Bunnings Warehouse group.
The 2.5-hectare site has sold for about $10 million to the hardware retailer, which is unlikely to keep the dilapidated eyesore.
The Wesfarmers-owned Bunnings has yet to reveal its plans for the Pacific Highway site, which had been for sale since early last year.
It last traded in 1999 at $3.6 million, some 10 years after the prawn was built. It has 173 metres of highway frontage at West Ballina.
The roadhouse creators, the builders Glenn Industries and the Goulburn developers Louis and Attila Moknay of LA Developments, famed for two other big daggy icons, the Big Merino at Goulburn and the Big Oyster at Taree, spent $500,000 and six months to erect it in 1989-90.
But it has become an eyesore, with the owner recently required by the council to clean up the graffiti-ridden giant crustacean.
The Ballina Shire approved plans in 2009 for the demolition of the Big Prawn and the petrol station.
It had been listed through Michael Shay at LJ Hooker and North Coast Commercial Real Estate agent Troy Outerbridge. Another bulky goods site on the same stretch as the Big Prawn has been sold by Outerbridge. The 6700-squre-metre site had a $2.68 million asking price.
“Bunnings continues to actively development seek new sites,” its managing director John Gillam told the Australian Financial Review.
“This includes the acquisition of a site in Ballina, which is also the site of the Big Prawn.”
Gillam says the group was now preparing a development application for the site and will “work with the relevant stakeholders to determine an appropriate future for the local attraction”.
The Big Prawn has been a source of colour writing over the years. Writer Dan Silkstone noted after a 2005 visit that the roadhouse had 24 dishes at the all-you-can-eat buffet and “none of them contain prawns, which seems misleading”.
Robert Drewe wrote after its demolition approval debate in 2009 that the man who built the Big Prawn, Tony Grosset, of Glenn Industries, said it would be easy to move.
“The giant tourist-trapping crustacean, 30 metres of pink cement tiger prawn situated on the highway at Ballina, in the Northern Rivers, has ‘gone off’,” Drewe wrote in The Age.
“Three owners and several million fish-and-chip servings later, it no longer looks like fresh seafood, it has gone cross-eyed with fatigue, it's peeling, and its present owner wants to toss it out. “
“Tastes change, even in Ballina, whose most impressive civic structure is the wave-shaped RSL club and where the motorised mobility scooter with its compulsory boxing-kangaroo flag is the vehicle a la mode.
“A month ago it was decided the prawn should be demolished. And when this leading retiree destination decides that something is passe, you can believe its time has truly passed,” Drewe suggested.
Columnist Emma Tom called it “excitingly realistic” in 1995.
