The Big Cigarette

The subject makes it an artefact of a vanished advertising world. Tobacco promotion has been progressively banned in Australia since the 1970s – broadcast, print, sponsorship, point of sale, and eventually the packaging itself under plain-packaging law in 2012. An oversized cigarette could not be commissioned as promotion today, which means anything surviving is a leftover rather than a current statement.

The catalogue holds one other tobacco object: the chimney at Myrtleford, painted as a cigarette, on a former tobacco processing plant in a district that really did grow the crop. That one commemorates an industry. This one, in a motel foyer in western Queensland, has no local tobacco connection at all and reads as a curio.

Its indoor location is unusual too. Almost every entry in this collection stands outside in the weather; this is one of a very small group – with the Melbourne Central pocket watch – that lives inside a building and depends on the building being open.

Charleville is a substantial Warrego town, better known for the Cosmos Centre, the Bilby Experience and the vortex guns built to try to make rain in 1902.

Neither the sources nor the catalogue give what it is made from and an attribution.