World’s Tallest Bin

That qualification matters and the record keeps it. Australia has plenty of objects asserting a world title and rather few holding one. By contrast the Big Funnel Web holds an actual Guinness World Record for the largest spider sculpture, which is precisely the kind of documented claim the tallest-bin title is not.

A giant bin is also the only object in this catalogue built to change behaviour rather than to sell something or celebrate something. The committee wanted townspeople to stop littering. Whether an eight-metre bin achieves that is impossible to know, but as a piece of civic messaging it is refreshingly direct: here is the thing you are supposed to use, made impossible to ignore.

The alliterative committee name is very much of its era, and reads differently now than it did in 1980.

Kalgoorlie is the great Western Australian gold town, built on the Golden Mile – for a long period the richest square mile of gold-bearing earth on earth – and it is a place accustomed to superlatives. The Super Pit alongside the town is one of the largest open-cut gold mines in the world.

Against that, an eight-metre bin claiming a title nobody adjudicates is fairly modest.

The maker and materials are not recorded here.