The Big Windmill

That replacement is the quiet subject of the whole museum. For a century the windmill was how water came out of the ground across inland Australia: no fuel, no attention, pumping whenever the wind blew, which on the Nullarbor fringe is most of the time. Solar pumping has displaced them within a couple of decades, and the mills coming down across the country are the reason a museum like this could be assembled at all.

Bruce is the centrepiece and the reason people stop. Penong is a small town on the Eyre Highway west of Ceduna, at the eastern approach to the Nullarbor crossing, and a giant windmill there catches drivers at the point where the country starts getting serious.

The museum is free and open, and Tourism Australia promotes Bruce as its signature selfie stop.

It belongs with the honest objects in this catalogue – the ones that are the actual machinery rather than a representation of it, like Big Lizzie at Red Cliffs and the turbine blade at Snowtown.

The documentation is missing the dimensions or its age.