A giant black and white cow statue stands in front of a building, surrounded by construction equipment and orange barriers. Cartoon-style yellow action lines highlight the statue as people look up and raise their arms in excitement.
A typical reaction to the Morrinsville Megacow. (Photo: Lynn Grieveson)

SocietyNovember 18, 2025

An ode to the Morrinsville Megacow, the nation’s id in a single object

Senior writer
A giant black and white cow statue stands in front of a building, surrounded by construction equipment and orange barriers. Cartoon-style yellow action lines highlight the statue as people look up and raise their arms in excitement.
A typical reaction to the Morrinsville Megacow. (Photo: Lynn Grieveson)

New Zealand is the Morrinsville Megacow, the Morrinsville Megacow is New Zealand.

Now the Earth was formless and empty, darkness covered the surface of the watery depths, and the cow was hovering over the surface of the waters.

– The Bible

In Sigmund Freud’s theory, the id is the unconscious, primitive part of the personality. It’s who you are at your most basic level when all the self-censorship and fakery is stripped away; a collection of raw appetites and desires unmediated by the wheedling and bargaining of the ego.

New Zealand’s id is stationed at 86 Thames St in rural Waikato. It’s 6.5m tall, weighs three tonnes, and is made out of woven fibreglass and resin. The Morrinsville Megacow is this country’s essence distilled into a single object. If milked, it would produce 1,000 litres a day.

Just about every town in New Zealand has its big thing. Most advertise part of their area’s identity. Paeroa famously boasts a massive L&P bottle. Taihape, the gumboot capital of the world, has a big gumboot. Others are more esoteric. For years Wellington was overseen by a huge sentient hand. Auckland has the Sky Tower and a gigantic smug dickhead in the park. 

All these big things have their boosters. I’ve personally campaigned to put the original lettering of the Huntly Deka sign in our national museum. Tirau’s corrugated iron dog and sheep represent the best of New Zealand architecture. Bulls’ commitment to placing anatomically accurate testicles on its array of life-size bull statues is both admirable and deeply off-putting.

A black statue of a bull stands on an orange background, facing slightly to the right. The sculpture captures realistic muscular details and textures.
One of the anatomically accurate bulls statues in Bulls. (Photo: Hayden Donnell)

None compare to the megacow. Though ostensibly created by the Maber family as a tribute to Morrinsville’s thriving dairy industry, it transcends its origins and temporal boundaries. The cow is situated at what passes for a place of power in New Zealand: on a state highway outside a warehouse selling farming equipment, directly opposite a New World and a Mobil. From its throne atop a pyramid of roading, farming and extortionate food pricing, it reigns over us all.

I visited the megacow during what was meant to be my family’s summer holiday. It was a sunny day, perfect for picking strawberries, but drawn by some unnameable force I wrenched my children away from the orchard and towards a small town northeast of Hamilton. 

A woman and two children sit in front of a large black and white cow statue on a sunny day, with a busy road, buildings, and blue sky with clouds in the background.
Everyone in my family loved being diverted from their summer holiday to see the megacow. (Photo: Hayden Donnell)

At first glance, the cow’s inauspicious surroundings detract from the sense of grandeur that should come with its size. But then, a slow-dawning revelation. The surroundings are part of the message. What is New Zealand if not a huge cow staring blankly at the supermarket duopoly? What are we if not a pair of massive bovine nostrils huffing exhaust fumes 24 hours a day?

Shortly before I visited the cow, the government announced that farming would retain its privileged position outside our emissions trading scheme indefinitely. More recently, it gutted the Zero Carbon Act, torpedoing a painstaking effort from former Green leader James Shaw and former National climate spokesperson Todd Muller to create bipartisan consensus on climate legislation. Around the same time, Labour announced that farming landlords will be exempt from its proposed capital gains tax. What else could it be but the cow, the cow, the all-powerful cow? It stands stoic and unblinking on its green plinth, overseeing the action every step of the way.

Since making contact with the megacow, I’ve been talking with an artist about commissioning a portrait. The idea is to paint it in its metaphorical, rather than literal, truth. Instead of artificial grass, it will stand astride the nation, surveying the masses beneath its dark hooves. The cow, in the artist’s words, will be a great and terrible looming idol, stark against the gloaming sky.

I’ve put the idea to my wife. “There are probably other things that I’d rather spend $500 on,” she says. But that’s just her ego talking. The id knows what it wants, and it wants a cow. If the megacow is milked, it will produce 1,000 litres per day. But of what? Milk? No. Those massive fibreglass udders will emit the soul of a nation, seeping cracked-sewage-pipe effluvia, ecoli-infused river water and thousands of pairs of jandals out across State Highway 26 and over New World, spreading across the stark green expanses of Waikato and enveloping us all in its sickly embrace. I want that power in my possession. I want to pay tribute to the cow. I want us all to pay tribute. And I think even Freud would agree that’s a healthy and normal desire.

A man in a grey shirt takes a selfie in front of a large statue of a cow's udder outdoors, with buildings, a black fence, and green grass in the background.
The udders that contain a nation. (Photo: Hayden Donnell)

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