The Big Camera

That combination – a building-as-object containing a serious collection of the thing it depicts – is rare and satisfying. Most novelty architecture houses a shop or a café; this one houses the subject.

The 35mm camera is also a good choice of form and an increasingly historical one. The body, the lens barrel, the prism hump and the wind lever are a shape that anyone over about thirty recognises instantly and that younger visitors may not – which quietly makes the building itself part of the collection.

Meckering has a much darker claim to note. The town was almost completely destroyed by an earthquake on 14 October 1968, one of the largest recorded in Australia, which fractured the ground surface for dozens of kilometres and levelled most of the buildings. What stands here is substantially a rebuilt town, and the fault scarp is still visible in the paddocks.

Western Australia's oversized objects lean toward the unexpected, as Tourism WA itself notes, and a camera museum inside a camera is a fair example.

Nothing available settles any date at all and any figures for its size.