No one agrees what "all" the Big Things are — so no shortest path can honestly be drawn yet

Asked:

show me a map of all "big things" in Australia and the shortest path between them

Live sources put Australia's Big Things anywhere from 40 to 1,075. The best open geocoded source, TLCMap's January 2025 community layers, is explicitly marked incomplete. This page maps the 53 distinct coordinates that could be reliably parsed from TLCMap snippets, sets them beside a 329-item named catalogue from MyRig Adventures, and shows why a defensible shortest route needs a frozen list first. Coordinates in decimal degrees; any distance shown is straight-line kilometres.

The geocoded subset: 53 points, with an indicative nearest-neighbour line — not "the shortest path"

NSW test layerAnimal test layer (NT & ACT records)Indicative nearest-neighbour line (straight-line, greedy, not a solved optimum)

The dashed line is a greedy nearest-neighbour chain over great circles, starting at the northernmost point — an illustration of scale only. It ignores roads, ferries and Bass Strait, is not a travelling-salesperson optimum, and covers only this visible geocoded subset (53 of hundreds claimed nationwide).

Five live sources, five different answers to "how many"

What the map cannot say alone

Wikipedia counted 1,075 Big Things as of 2022 — five times the most careful academic list. en.wikipedia.org

A research appendix fixed a list at 250 and openly excluded debated candidates like the Big Pencils at Tweed Heads. readkong.com

TLCMap's four national category layers hold 69 animal, 69 food/vegetable, 60 inanimate/mineral and 11 person records — 209 before deduplication — and every layer carries the warning "this map is incomplete". tlcmap.org

MyRig's six state pages yielded 329 named attractions, but its Queensland page failed to fetch and the articles expose almost no exact coordinates. myrigadventures.com

What a real shortest route would take

A defensible route — and a total distance worth quoting — needs all five, and none was available here, so no route distance is presented:

A frozen inclusion list: which Big Things count, decided before routing.
Verified currently-existing, publicly accessible status for each.
Road-network travel times, including ferries and the Bass Strait crossing to Tasmania.
A choice of start/end point or round trip.
A travelling-salesperson solver over that fixed matrix.

The 329 named attractions from MyRig's state pages

Name	State	Locality	Status	Source

Data checked on 31 August 2026. Map points: 53 distinct coordinates parsed from TLCMap layer 2346 (NSW, JSON/CSV/KML snippets) and layer 2351 (animal, JSON snippet), community layers dated January 2025 and marked incomplete; coordinates in decimal degrees. Catalogue: 329 named attractions from six MyRig Adventures state pages; Queensland page failed to fetch; unresolved locality cells left blank. The dashed line is greedy nearest-neighbour over straight-line (haversine) kilometres, not road distance and not an optimum. Layer counts and source claims quoted from source pages verbatim; no nationwide route total computed because none was validly computable.