Iconic Zookeepers Elephant Finds New Home in Invercargill Central

The Zookeepers elephant is back out of hiding for some years, and taking pride of place on the verandah at Invercargill Central.

When Paul Clark closed his successful cafe on Tay Street in 2019, the iconic corrugated iron elephant on the roof was sold to the developers of Invercargill Central.

Promising they would do something good with it when the time came, the elephant is enjoying its new home outside the cinema.

Paul said he paid a fortune for iron sculptor Jeff Thomson of Wellington to create the African elephant back in 1991, and never told anyone how much it cost.

“Six thousand dollars was a lot of money back then.  We drove up to Wellington and picked it up and then put it up on the roof with a forklift and tied it down… Southland weather and all.”

Paul now works in construction in Queenstown and said he was stoked that the elephant had finally found a new home.

“I was always worried about where it could go.  You could put it in a bush somewhere but it’d just rust away.”

In 2016 the elephant received a bit of a spruce up, because after 20 years on the roof it had started to deteriorate quite a bit.

The elephant has never had a name, “he’s just the elephant,” Paul said, but he is specifically African because of the size of his ears.