On his immaculate porch, Cliff Overton isn’t wearing his fob-watch or his waistcoat, but he still looks dapper. The bright home he shares with his wife, civic planner Tanya Young, turns out to be a museum of sorts, but nothing like the gothic Wunderkammer you might expect. A new weatherboard perched on a modest precipice of bushy Melbourne exurb, it houses sheeny homewares displayed uniformly on clean surfaces, like specimens. The only concession to Overton’s fetish is the odd rusty apparatus on display. ‘There’s this,’ he says, lifting an antique camera from a cabinet.

Until recently, the 36-year-old industrial designer-turned-firefighter didn’t know he was part of a globally burgeoning subculture. ‘It wasn’t until I was at a friend’s house,’ Overton recalls. ‘He showed me Datamancer [a technofetish website]. I found that there was a genre in which I could contextualise what I’d been doing.’