One 13,332.6 km straight-line sweep threads all 148 mapped Big Things, from Scottsdale's Big Thumbs Up to Darwin's Big Owl

Asked:“show me map of all "big things" in australia and the shortest path between them.”

148 current Big Things from five community-contributed TLCMap layers (animals, food, objects, people, and a Queensland test layer), each with coordinates and dates, joined by a nearest-neighbour shortest-path heuristic. Distances are great-circle kilometres between stops — not a drivable road route.

Pin colour runs with route position: ● start (Tasmania) → ● finish (Darwin). The orange line is the computed straight-line path in stop order. Hover a pin or itinerary row for name, locality, dates and distances.

The longest jump is leg 142 — 1,479.8 km across the Gulf country to the Giant Jumping Crocodile near Darwin; it alone is 11% of the whole route. tlcmap.org

Just five legs over 400 km (to the Giant Jumping Crocodile, Big Books, Big Apple, Big Crocodile and Big Miner) account for 4,073 km — nearly a third of the total — while the dense east-coast run averages well under 60 km per hop. tlcmap.org

The tightest pair sits in Cootamundra: Don Bradman's Bat and Stumps and the Giant are only 1.6 km apart. tlcmap.org

The oldest dated stop is Ploddy the Dinosaur (1963); the route ends at the Big Owl (Chinute Chinute), unveiled around 2010, after 13,332.6 cumulative kilometres. tlcmap.org

Full itinerary, in route order

#	Big Thing	Locality	Since	Leg km	Total km	Source

Method: “all” means all unique records with valid Australian coordinates and an end date of 2025-01-01 or later in the five fetched TLCMap Big Things category/test layers — a mapped research subset, not every claimed Big Thing (broader web lists claim 600+ to 1,075). TLCMap labels these community-contributed layers incomplete; they draw on the Wikipedia list accessed 14 January 2025 plus additions. Historical/removed records ending before 2025 were excluded. The route is a multi-start nearest-neighbour heuristic (start from every stop, repeatedly visit the closest unvisited stop, keep the shortest result) — an approximation of the shortest open Hamiltonian path, not a proven optimum. Distances are great-circle straight-line kilometres, not road distances; no return to start. Data retained as sourced, anomalies included — inspect the source links. 148 rows; assembled 31 August 2026 from TLCMap records current to the layers' 2025 dates.