Giant Crocodile Head – Broome

Malcolm Douglas is the reason it exists and the reason it is not simply a novelty. He spent some forty years making adventure films about northern Australia, becoming one of the best-known figures in Australian wildlife documentary, and the park was his – a working crocodile facility and the physical expression of a long career. The shop museum still displays material from those four decades of filmmaking.

Saltwater crocodiles in the Kimberley reach sizes that make the entrance less of an exaggeration than it looks, and building the doorway as a head rather than as a gate is the single most efficient way of telling arriving visitors what they are about to be within a few metres of.

Walk-through animal entrances are a distinct and under-recognised branch of the tradition – the mouth as doorway, which Australia has produced several examples of and which requires the sculpture to be structurally sound in a way a display piece does not.

Because it is the entry to an operating commercial wildlife park, seeing it means going to the park, which is why this record marks it restricted rather than roadside.