A magnitude-5.7 earthquake hit near the West Australian town of Walpole, about 430 kilometres south-east of Perth, with tremors felt as far away as Perth and Albany on Sunday afternoon.

No serious damage was reported, but the quake was considered "uncommonly large".

Some of the largest recorded earthquakes across Australia have happened in WA.

The magnitude-5.7 earthquake felt like a 'bomb underfoot' for those close to the epicentre. ( Supplied: Geoscience Australia )

The largest was the 6.5-magnitude quake at Meckering in 1968 that injured 20 and left hundreds of families homeless.

But Western Australia is in the middle of a tectonic plate, so how do earthquakes even happen here in the first place?

No fault line doesn't mean no worries

Geoscience Australia said no part of the Earth's surface is free from earthquakes.

But most of the world's quakes do happen at tectonic plate boundaries, where different plates meet and push against one another.

The majority happen around the edge of the Pacific Plate, also known as the 'Ring of Fire'.

It affects New Zealand, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Japan and the Americas, as well as Indonesia, where the Indo-Australian plate collides with the Eurasian and Pacific plate.

WA is far from the 'Ring of Fire', so why do we still get quakes?

Geoscience Australia senior seismologist Professor Phil Cummins said WA sits on the Australian plate.

Despite being outside the 'Ring of Fire', it still experiences quakes because forces exerted by the activity going on around the edges of the Indo-Australian plate.

The plate on which we sit is being pushed north and is colliding with the Eurasian, Philippine and Pacific plates.

Despite sitting inside its own plate, "compressive stress" in the interior can build up and cause tremors. ( Wikimedia Commons: United States Geological Survey )

That causes a build-up of "mainly compressive stress in the interior" of the plate, which is released during earthquakes.

"These stresses come from the forces exerted at the plate boundaries in Indonesia, New Zealand and New Guinea, where they're major forces there in some of those collisions zones especially," Professor Cummins said.

"Those forces get transmitted through the plate and result in the build-up of stress inside the plate.

"The stress gradually builds up over hundreds and thousands of years.

"It builds up to the point that it's able to rupture faults in the earth's crust so that's why you get earthquakes in Western Australia."

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Watch Duration: 1 minute 18 seconds 1 m 18 s West Australian farmers say they heard "an almighty roar" as a quake shook farmhouse

So what kind of quake did we just have?

The weekend's earthquake was classified as a shallow intraplate quake.

"(Shallow intraplate quakes) occur in the relatively stable interior of continents away from plate boundaries," Geoscience Australia said.

"They are less common and do not follow easily recognisable patterns. This type of earthquake generally originates at shallow depths."

Where are you most likely to experience a quake in WA?

Professor Cummins said it is certainly not uncommon for WA to experience quakes and the weekend's was actually the second to hit the region in a week.

"There are those relatively high seismicity areas in the Wheatbelt, near Meckering, and then up further north along the north-west coast," he said.

"We don't really know why those areas have higher seismicity … but the earthquake records show pretty clearly that you do get more earthquakes there than elsewhere in WA."