The Big Octopus – Lakes Entrance

That phrasing – custodians describing it as still sitting there – is the honest register for an object of this kind, and the record keeps it. A rooftop sculpture on a private museum is entirely dependent on the building and the family that runs it.

Griffiths Sea Shell Museum is itself a survivor. Shell museums were a genuine Australian roadside genre in the middle of the twentieth century, when collecting was a mass hobby and coastal towns filled with them. Almost all have closed. Lakes Entrance is one of the last, and it belongs to the same era and impulse as the object on its roof.

Roof-mounted Big Things are a small group here – the Taree oyster on its car dealership, the Cairns scout hat on a control room. Elevation solves a real problem: at ground level a sculpture competes with parked cars and signage, while on a roofline it clears everything and reads from a distance.

An octopus is also unusually well suited to the position. The arms can wrap over gutters and eaves, so the sculpture engages the building rather than merely resting on it, in a way a fish or a shell never could.

The catalogue cannot supply any attribution, any figures for its size and the year.