Perth, WA, Australia | c. 1930s
Photo by James Wong
At first, there was just a trickle of tourists who would occasionally snap photos of the Nattrass family’s little boathouse, a sweet exclamation point capping off a rickety boardwalk on the Swan River in Perth, Australia. But the tourists kept coming back, growing from that trickle into hundreds. Then thousands. The numbers of tourists have grown so overwhelming that in 2019 the city of Perth decided to spend $400,000 on a solar-powered toilet facility to serve them.
Once threatened with demolition by the Australian government, the Crawley Edge Boatshed is the most photographed spot in Perth, and tourists wait their turn along the waterfront to take selfies in front of what has become an iconic landmark. Some researchers are even studying the Blue Boathouse phenomenon to better understand how photo sharing led to this remarkably unremarkable organic online popularity.