‘Where’d you find tyres that size?’ Giant red tractor is Australia’s newest Big Thing

On the flat plains of midwest Western Australia , three hours north of Perth, there is a new marker on the horizon.

A red tractor, standing 11.5 metres tall and 16 metres long, dominates the skyline of the small town of Carnamah. The tractor is an exact replica of a Chamberlain 40K, built to five times the scale. It is the world's biggest tractor statue, and the latest addition to Australia's catalogue of Big Things .

The tractor was unveiled to a crowd of more than 2,000 people on Saturday.

The tyres posed the biggest challenge in construction, says the retired farmer Bob Lukins, one of the men who spearheaded the project. They're 7.8 metres in diameter, larger than the biggest commercially available tyres.

"When people saw it they said, 'where'd you find tyres that size?' Because they look like tyres, until you tap them," Lukins says. "They are not tyres, they are fabricated steel."

Lukins is one of the founding members of the WA Vintage Tractor and Machinery Association, or Tracmach, which was formed in 1981 and now has 600 members. In 1986, he says, they started talking about the idea of building a giant tractor somewhere in the WA wheatbelt, to showcase the state's agricultural history and act as an advertisement for Tracmach's machinery field days.

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But they never had the money or the government buy-in. Six years ago, they connected with a retired machinery dealer in Carnamah who put them in contact with the Carnamah historical society. The local shire got on board, but the project still didn't have any money.

"We applied for every grant there was," Lukins says. "We got every one knocked back."

Eventually they connected with Frank Kidman, an engineer who agreed to waive the $20,000 design fee in lieu of the big tractor committee buying him the technical equipment needed to draw up the plans.

"We got a Chamberlain 40K and we put it outside his back door, right off his deck," Lukins says. "He measured every single part on that tractor, put it in the computer and five-timesed it. It took him more than 400 hours."

The Chamberlain 40K was chosen for its importance to WA agriculture. The machines were designed by the Victorian tractor mechanic Bob Chamberlain, who designed the prototype in the 1930s specifically for large landholdings like those in the expanding wheatbelt, midwest and Esperance cropping regions of WA. The tractors were manufactured in an ex-munitions factory in the Perth suburb of Welshpool and the first Chamberlain 40Ks rolled off the line in 1949.

At 40 horsepower and weighing one tonne, the tractors were bigger and more suited to WA conditions than other tractors on the market at that time.

In commemorating the tractor, Lukins says they are also honouring the work done by "our fathers, grandfathers, and their wives" in establishing the farming region.

"The sheer hard work that those men and women did in those early days, firstly with horses and then with those early tractors, helped to get us to the stage that we are now where we all have a very high standard of living. And it's now a little bit forgotten," he says.

The statue was constructed piece by piece by the mining contractor DIAB Engineering, in the nearby town of Geraldton. Sixty people worked on it over 17 months. It was delivered to Carnamah on six prime mover trucks and assembled, with final paint touch-ups, over the course of a week.

The entire project has been funded through community fundraising efforts. Led by Tracmach's president, John Piavanni, and Brendan Haeusler from the Big Tractor Project, the fundraising has netted $600,000 in private and corporate donations and some regional development grants, but the total cost for the project is $750,000.

"We have not finished paying for it yet. We still have to raise a bit more money," Lukins says.

"But it's a huge achievement for the Tracmach organisation. It puts WA and Australia on the map."