"Mundi Mundi Man" Worlds Largest Work of Art
MAKING MYSTERY & MAKING HISTORY
Mundi Mundi Man — Ando’s Monumental Artwork in the Australian Outback
Almost mysteriously, a giant image of an Australian stockman appeared etched into the red earth of the Mundi Mundi Plains near Broken Hill, New South Wales.
From the ground, there was little indication of what was taking shape. But from the air, an extraordinary figure emerged — a vast portrait of an Australian stockman stretching across more than four million square metres of Outback landscape.
It became known as Mundi Mundi Man, also referred to as Mundi Man or Eldee Man, and was created by Australian artist Ando as a tribute to the pioneers who opened up and lived in the Australian Outback. NSW planning documentation later described the work as an immense landscape artwork covering more than four million square metres, with the landscape itself effectively being used as the artist’s canvas.
The scale was extraordinary. The figure was approximately 2 kilometres across, and contemporary accounts have described the work as one of the largest artworks ever created.
But perhaps the most remarkable part of the story was not simply its size.
It was how Ando created it.
FROM THE BIG PICTURE TO THE BIGGEST CANVAS OF ALL
Ando had already established a reputation for thinking on an extraordinary scale.
In 2001, he unveiled The Big Picture in Broken Hill — a colossal 100-metre-long, 12-metre-high acrylic painting on canvas, created entirely by one artist. The Australian Book of Records recognises it as the world's largest acrylic painting on canvas by a single artist.
But almost immediately, Ando began thinking about something even more ambitious.
Instead of painting on canvas, he would make the landscape itself his canvas.
The following year, Ando and his partner, Christine Righetti, embarked on the enormous undertaking that would become Mundi Mundi Man. According to Ando's account, they deliberately kept the project secret for more than a year while it was being constructed in the remote Outback.
The concept was deceptively simple:
Take an enormous landscape and turn it into a drawing.
Making it happen was anything but simple.
THE ENGINEER BECOMES THE PAINTBRUSH
Ando's background as a mining engineer became a crucial part of the project.
Creating an image of this size required an enormous amount of spatial planning and calculation. The artist had to translate a relatively small drawing into a figure kilometres across while ensuring that every feature — the eyes, nose, mouth, hat and body — would align correctly when viewed from thousands of feet above.
Ando has described the process as requiring tens of thousands of calculations.
“I was the paintbrush with my tractor!”
Rather than relying on modern aerial imaging throughout the construction, Ando says he deliberately wanted to experience the challenge of creating the image without seeing the completed figure from above.
He relied heavily on measurements, geometry, spatial judgement and instinct.
The NSW planning documentation independently confirms the extraordinary scale of the calculations and the use of the landscape as the canvas.
THE NAZCA LINES OF THE AUSTRALIAN OUTBACK
The idea had been forming in Ando's imagination for years.
As a young man, he had become fascinated by the mysterious Nazca Lines of Peru — enormous drawings etched into the desert that can only truly be appreciated from above.
The mystery surrounding how ancient people could create such enormous images without modern aircraft or aerial technology fascinated him.
Ando wanted to create his own version.
But instead of creating an ancient-looking symbol, he chose something unmistakably Australian:
a stockman.
The figure represented the men and women who pioneered the vast Australian interior — people whose lives were shaped by distance, isolation, drought, livestock and the immense Outback landscape.
The original figure was drawn by Ando, who then translated that drawing onto the Mundi Mundi Plains.
A TRACTOR INSTEAD OF A PAINTBRUSH
There was no enormous bucket of paint.
There was no giant stencil.
And there was certainly no conventional canvas.
Ando used a tractor as his drawing instrument, carefully carving the lines of the figure into the landscape.
From the air, the lines appeared almost like solid red strokes.
On the ground, however, the technique was much more subtle.
The image was created using shallow furrows and carefully managed vegetation, creating the visual effect of lines when viewed from above. Ando has emphasised that considerable care was taken with the landscape rather than simply destroying vegetation to create the image.
It was, in effect, a form of monumental landscape drawing.
The result was an enormous natural artwork in which the desert itself became the medium.
ALMOST A YEAR IN THE OUTBACK
For almost a year, Ando and Christine lived in an old shearers' quarters while working on the project.
They would head out each morning and work through the day.
There was no studio.
No comfortable gallery environment.
No convenient access to technology or the internet.
Just the enormous Mundi Mundi landscape, surveying equipment, a tractor and the increasingly ambitious drawing taking shape beneath their feet.
The conditions were hot, dusty and uncomfortable.
But according to Ando and Christine, the experience was also one of the great adventures of their lives.
They were not simply creating an artwork.
They were living inside the artwork while making it.
THE MOMENT OF TRUTH
Perhaps the greatest gamble came at the end.
Ando had deliberately avoided viewing the entire work from the air during its construction.
He had calculated everything.
He had measured everything.
He believed the image would be correct.
But there was still one enormous question:
Would it actually work?
Would the face look right?
Would the eyes line up?
Would the mouth be in the correct position?
Would the proportions hold together when seen from thousands of feet above?
When the time finally came to see the completed work from the air, Ando has described the enormous relief of discovering that the face had come together correctly.
He joked that at least he had avoided having to call it “a Picasso.”
REVEALING THE SECRET TO THE WORLD
Once Mundi Mundi Man was complete, Christine faced another challenge:
How do you tell the world about an enormous artwork hidden in one of the most remote parts of Australia?
There was no social media.
No broadband connection.
No convenient communications infrastructure.
According to Ando's account, Christine worked with a satellite telephone and organised multiple film crews, including a crew associated with Ripley's Believe It or Not!, to document the project before its public unveiling.
The strategy worked.
When the story was released, Mundi Mundi Man attracted international media attention, and Ando was inundated with interview requests via satellite phone from media organisations around the world.
The work subsequently featured on Ripley's Believe It or Not! and was promoted internationally as an extraordinary example of monumental landscape art.
THE VIEW FROM THE SKY
Mundi Mundi Man was never intended to be experienced primarily from ground level.
It was an artwork designed for the sky.
The optimum viewing height was approximately 2,000–3,000 feet, where the enormous figure suddenly resolved into a recognisable human form.
As an aircraft approached over the Barrier Ranges, the landscape initially appeared ordinary.
Then the figure began to emerge.
The hat.
The face.
The shoulders.
The stockman's unmistakable outline.
The closer the aircraft came, the larger the figure appeared.
Contemporary descriptions captured the strange sensation of watching an apparently impossible image emerge from the desert.
One airline pilot even contacted Ando after seeing Mundi Mundi Man from approximately 30,000 feet while flying internationally from Sydney towards Asia, reportedly pointing the figure out to passengers on board.
THE DESERT'S OWN MAGIC TRICK
There was another remarkable phenomenon.
The artwork could appear to disappear.
As the sun moved across the sky, the shadows and subtle contours created by the furrows changed.
At certain times of day, the shadows flattened and the figure became extremely difficult to see.
From the air, it could seem to fade back into the landscape.
Then, under different lighting conditions, the enormous stockman would emerge again.
It was almost as though the artwork had its own switch — controlled not by electricity, but by the movement of the sun.
This unusual interaction between landscape, light, shadow and time became an intrinsic part of the experience.
A WORK THAT COULD BE SEEN FROM SPACE
The scale of Mundi Mundi Man attracted attention well beyond Australia.
The artwork was featured in discussions of unusual sights visible through satellite imagery and appeared in Google Earth-related coverage.
PCWorld described Ando's work as an image of a cowboy created across roughly a square mile of Australian Outback, noting that it was intended to represent the people who pioneered the region.
Another international publication described Mundi Mundi Man as an artwork covering approximately four square kilometres, noting that the stockman's mouth alone was comparable in length to the height of New York's Empire State Building.
The numbers are difficult to comprehend until you see an aerial photograph.
Only then does the true scale become apparent.
BIGGER THAN A RECORD
Mundi Mundi Man was widely described as the world's largest work of art.
Ando's own records state that the artwork covered more than 4,000,000 square metres, with some published accounts giving a figure of approximately 4.3 million square metres.
The NSW planning documentation later recorded the work as covering more than four million square metres and described it as an example of monumental landscape art in which the landscape itself becomes the canvas.
Its scale was so extraordinary that it dwarfed many other examples of monumental contemporary art.
Ando has also compared its scale with large environmental works such as Christo's installations, noting that Mundi Mundi Man was several times larger than an earlier work that had been described as the world's largest.
But for Ando, the achievement was never simply about breaking a record.
It was about creating an emotional experience.
“THE ULTIMATE FOR AN ARTIST”
Ando has explained why he is repeatedly drawn to projects that appear almost impossible:
“With a typical painting a few people can enjoy it. However, these big projects can be seen by millions of people — and they evoke emotions from viewers that I cannot describe or explain. That is the ultimate for an artist.”
That philosophy explains the connection between The Big Picture and Mundi Mundi Man.
One uses an enormous canvas.
The other uses an enormous landscape.
But both are based on the same fundamental idea:
Art does not always have to fit inside a frame.
A PORTRAIT OF THE OUTBACK
The stockman was deliberately chosen because he represented something deeply connected to the Australian landscape.
Mundi Mundi Man was not intended merely to be a gigantic drawing.
It was Ando's tribute to the people who lived, worked and pioneered across the Outback.
The artwork also became a portrait of the landscape itself — the vast plains, enormous skies and extraordinary sense of distance that surround Broken Hill and Silverton.
For Ando, it was also personal.
It connected his art with the region in which he had grown up and with the Australian Outback that had inspired so much of his work.
NATURE EVENTUALLY TOOK IT BACK
Perhaps fittingly, the artwork was never intended to be permanent.
Mundi Mundi Man was created from the landscape itself, and the landscape eventually reclaimed it.
In the years following its completion, severe dry conditions and prolonged drought affected the area. Wind, heat and the natural regrowth of vegetation gradually erased the carefully created lines.
Eventually, the enormous stockman faded back into the desert.
The landscape that had been the canvas became the eraser.
Unlike a painting preserved behind glass, Mundi Mundi Man could not be permanently protected from the elements.
It existed because of the land — and ultimately disappeared because of it.
MAKING MYSTERY. MAKING HISTORY.
Mundi Mundi Man was an extraordinary experiment in what art could become.
It was a drawing without paper.
A painting without paint.
A canvas measured in square kilometres.
A portrait that could not truly be understood from the ground.
And an artwork created by one artist using a tractor, mathematics, surveying, instinct and an enormous amount of determination.
Ando had already taken painting beyond the conventional canvas with The Big Picture.
With Mundi Mundi Man, he went one step further.
He turned the Australian landscape itself into his canvas.
For a brief period in the early 21st century, a gigantic stockman stood etched across the red earth of the Mundi Mundi Plains — visible from aircraft, satellite imagery and the eyes of anyone fortunate enough to fly above it.
Today, the artwork has largely disappeared.
But the story remains.
And perhaps that is the most appropriate ending for an artwork inspired by the mystery of the Nazca Lines:
You could see Mundi Mundi Man from the sky — but you could never fully possess it.
It belonged to the landscape.
And eventually, the landscape took it back.
Sources and supporting references
The strongest independent sources I found are the NSW planning documentation, which records Mundi Man as a landscape artwork covering more than four million square metres, and the Australian Traveller feature, which records the work at approximately 4.3 million square metres.
Ando's own account provides the detailed story of the project's conception, engineering calculations, tractor construction, secrecy, media launch, aerial viewing, Ripley's Believe It or Not! appearance and eventual disappearance through drought and natural regeneration.
Contemporary international coverage also documented Mundi Man as a giant Outback geoglyph visible from the air and satellite imagery.
"Mundi Mundi Man" from 3000 feet above.
Ando inside the “World's Largest Signature".
“World's Largest Signature” Mundi Mundi Man.
"Mundi Mundi Man" from 5000 feet above.
“Mundi Mundi Man” Looking West from 5000 feet above.
“Mundi Mundi Man” From 5 km away looking North at 5000 feet above.
“Mundi Mundi Man” Looking South from 3000 feet above