The Reel Seat / Big Film Reel – Victoria Park

Suburban picture palaces are one of the great vanished building types of twentieth-century Australia. Almost every suburb and country town had one – often several – and the arrival of television from 1956 followed by the drive-in and then the multiplex closed them in waves. Most were demolished or converted beyond recognition, and what survives is usually a facade over a supermarket.

A film reel is a well-chosen memorial for that. It is an object that has itself become obsolete: 35mm projection is effectively finished, and a reel is now as historical as the buildings that used them.

Making it a seat is the second good decision. A commemorative plaque is read once by almost nobody. A bench is used daily by people who may never read anything about it, which puts the memorial into the ordinary use of the street rather than into a ceremony.

Albany Highway through Victoria Park is one of Perth's better café and restaurant strips, so the seat sits on a genuinely busy footpath.

Western Australia's public art collections are unusually well documented through Collections WA, which is why a modest street seat has an exact geotag and a recorded interpretation.

The designer is not named in the material available here.