Roadside colossi: the global allure of a really Big Thing and the Queensland expert plotting their rise

A giant statue of a proboscis monkey in Banjarmasin, Indonesia, an example of an oversized object from outside the English-language sphere. Photograph: Sam Hidayat

Perched atop a traffic island in Banjarmasin, Indonesia, is a proboscis monkey. Leaping from a roundabout in Mahdia, Tunisia, is a swordfish. Sprouting from an intersection in Kundasang, Malaysia, is a cabbage.

What unites this mammal in the delta city of the jungles of Borneo, fish in the ancient Mediterranean port and vegetable in the hill station of Sabah is size. For these are not things of ordinary proportion – these things are big. And they are just three of almost 10,000 big things scattered upon the face of the Earth that now, for the first time, have been painstakingly mapped and researched.