When in Monday's column we ran a photograph of what appears to be a pair of Canberra bus shelters now enjoying a career sea change as public lavatories on the Esplanade at Surfers Paradise we hoped it would amuse, and even intrigue.

Alas, it seems to have caused as much indignation as mirth. The dear old shelters are dear to the hearts of lots of Canberrans (methinks due in large part to artist Trevor Dickinson's portrayal of their innate quaintness and authentic Canberraness). Now there is some fuming at the thought that ACTION and the ACT government may be selling them off to buyers like, say, the Gold Coast City Council.

But now the plot, like Abbott's hair on some of its better days, appears to thicken.

Perhaps worried that this issue might topple the ACT government Shane Rattenbury, the Minister for Bus Shelters (he is Minister for Territory and Municipal Services and Minister Assisting on Transport Reform) assures us he treasures the shelters. He is giving them a sheltered life.

"I notice that Canberra's iconic concrete bus shelters have made a number of recent appearances in Gang-gang. Maligned by some for their austerity and heavy-set form, and loved by others for their functionality and uncomplicated nature, they are part of Canberra's cultural heritage and I simply cannot imagine our city without them.

"As a fan of both the shelters themselves and the work of Trevor Dickinson, I too was delighted to see them re-imagined him in the form of a coffee mug [pictured]. As Minister responsible for the ACTION bus service, I would like to reassure your readers that these Canberra icons are very much alive and well and serving the purpose for which they were originally designed. There are 496 of them in fact, currently providing shelter for Canberra bus users, being just over half of all bus shelters provided in the ACT."

We interrupt the minister for a moment to wonder quite what it is about the shelters that so beguiles so many of us. Can it be that their design contains some illustrious echoes, that their designer was influenced, perhaps subconsciously, by some very famous structures?

We ask this because one of my discerning and well-travelled colleagues, fond of the shelters, points out that they remind him of Martello towers. And yes, he's right. In the first half of the 19th century lots of the squat little fortresses were erected at strategic places in Britain in anticipation of having to repel invaders. That so many of them survive (some of the converted by the filthy rich into just the sorts of trendy homes that Kevin McCloud drools over in his Grand Designs TV show) is a tribute to their amazing sturdiness. Like the bus shelters they are fine examples of something designed to be utterly functional that somehow manages to be, too, a work of art.

Some of us, well-travelled, will be reminded too of the stubby, concrete World War II "pill boxes" placed at strategic points (especially on cliffs and beside roads and navigable rivers). When the Huns invaded plucky British soldiers were to fire out at them through the pill boxes' tiny, slit windows. These indestructible, irremovable pill boxes (like the Martello towers, utterly functional but strangely lovely) are everywhere in England. Enthusiasts enthuse over them. As urchins in Norfolk we used to play in them. When I saw them arise on the verges of Canberra in the 1970s they reminded me, with a twang of nostalgia, of the pill boxes of "home".

What if the designer of our iconic bus shelter was subconsciously influenced by iconic influences like these?

But back to the minister, who proclaims that: "When concrete shelters are replaced by Adshel shelters they are not discarded, nor are they sent to the Gold Coast for retirement. They are taken to the depot for storage until a new home can be found at another bus stop, so that they can continue their productive working lives."

In the light of this we and the minister's office are probing how it has come to pass that there appears to be a brace of our bus shelters enjoying a new career at Surfers Paradise. TAMS is pretty sure it has never on-sold a bus shelter.

What seems to be emerging from the mists of mystery is that the manufacturers of the squat little edifices (made in the 1970s) intended customers to adapt them to any purpose they, the purchasers, saw fit. And even as bus shelters the squat little sculptures are not unique to Canberra for we have have seen a photograph of one of them in Goulburn, standing forlornly on Victoria Street.

So perhaps, as our probing continues, the Surfers Paradise lavatories have always been lavatories, and always on the Gold Coast, and have never known the joy of careers in the ACT.