Abstract. Large dust-acoustic solitons and kinks in dusty plasmas with positive cold dust, nonthermally distributed electrons and Boltzmann ions have been studied in a systematic way, to delimit their compositional parameter space. The existence domain of positive solitons is limited by infinite dust compression, of negative ones by the occurrence of potential kinks, provided the electrons are sufficiently nonthermal and there is sufficient positive charge on the dust. There is a parameter range where both negative and positive solitary structures coexist.