In a town of 400 people, one pub, one restaurant and one grocery store, there now stands the world’s biggest tractor.

The Chamberlain 40K replica has been unveiled in the rural WA town of Carnamah, 300km north of Perth.

At 11.5 metres high, and 16 metres long, the steel statue is big enough for a 4WD to drive clean underneath it, and can be seen from 2 kilometres out of town.

Marking a farming region’s history

Bob Lukins was a founding member of the WA Vintage Tractor and Machinery Association, and spearheaded the idea to build the giant replica nearly three decades ago.

He said the Chamberlain 40K allowed farmers to clear and develop WA’s agricultural region from the mid 1900s. 

“We’d been through a couple of world wars, a bad Depression, it was primary production that was going to get Western Australia up and moving,” Mr Lukins said. 

“The Chamberlain 40K came on the market in 1949, and farmers could see that was the type of tractor that was needed. 

“Through Esperance, the Great Southern, the north midlands. All of that was being developed at a massive rate.”

Mr Lukins said building the Big Tractor was a way to preserve the history of WA’s farming machines and the people who drove them.

A community effort

The Big Tractor Committee estimates the project would have cost upwards of $1 million, if not for thousands of dollars of in-kind contributions from all over Australia.

Several applications for government grants to fund the tractor build failed, and organisers instead raised about $600,000 in private and corporate donations and awards from the Shire and local development commission. 

Mr Lukins said it made him “quite proud” of the effort it took to make it happen. 

“We got a heck of a lot of knockbacks,” he said.

The Big Tractor was designed by engineer Frank Kidman, who had an original Chamberlain 40K parked close to the back door of his house so that he could take precise measurements of every part, and enter them into a computer. 

Mr Lukins said the enormous effort ensured each component was exactly five times the scale of the original model, down to the nuts and bolts.  

The statue was then fabricated piece by piece in Geraldton by a team of 58 tradespeople from mining contractor DIAB Engineering over the past year. 

Project manager Xavier Sequeira said it took 800 litres of orange paint and 42 tonnes of steel to complete the structure.

“It was designed to look exactly like the 40K,” he said. 

“It’s a dead replica.”

The tractor parts were trucked 180 kilometres from Geraldton to Carnamah in 18 truckloads last week.

Two cranes were used to install the tractor on-site, and it was bolted together by the same project team that fabricated each piece. 

A global drawcard

Chair of the Big Tractor Committee Brendon Haeusler said Carnamah is one of the many rural WA towns where tourism remains an untapped resource. 

“All our country towns are mainly reliant on agriculture, and they’re definitely not getting any bigger,” he said. 

However, he said the Big Tractor had already started to put Carnamah on the map for national and international tourists. 

“There was a segment on the Dutch news, and a TikTokker in America — there’s been 100,000 views on it,” he said. 

Sandie Wallace runs a newsagent on the corner across from the tractor, and started embroidering polo shirts with the the words “Home of the world’s biggest tractor” about three weeks ago. 

She said she had already sold more than 85, and was taken aback by their immediate popularity.

“Everybody throughout Australia is talking about it,” she said.

“I had a gentleman in that said he belongs to tractor [web] sites throughout the world, and he said it’s all in the US and in Europe, so it’s gone worldwide.