When the Harths bought their four-hectare block in Cawarral in central Queensland last year, it came with the contents of two garden sheds and a yard full of ornaments and oddities.
Cathy and Phillip Harth were not to know then, nor for some time yet, that among the dingo traps and copper pots, old-fashioned clothes irons and metal shoe stretchers, at the back of a shed full of horse blankets and saddles – gathering dust in a milk crate – were the pieces of something special.
Over the months that followed, the Harths put it together: first the object, and then fragments of its curious history.
Today they know it as the Centenary of Melbourne Birthday Clock Cake. On Sunday, they will learn its monetary value when the solid silver artefact goes under the hammer almost 2,000km south in the genteel Melbourne suburb of Armadale.
Samuel Fricker and Dennice Collett of Gibson’s auction house hope the historic clock will be acquired by one of the city’s institutions for a sum in the tens of thousands of dollars.
“I mean, sometimes there’s what we call a barn find or a shed find, and they are always exciting,” Fricker says. “However, something of this calibre, this magnitude, this importance is pretty much once-in-a-lifetime.”
And, yet, when Cathy Harth first found that fateful crate last September, she nearly tossed its rusty contents out.
“It was filthy dirty, I wouldn’t have known what it was,” she says. “It was going in the bin.”
But something compelled Cathy – a cleaner by trade – to give the bits of junk-looking metal a good wipe. Perhaps it was her professional touch that revealed a clock face beneath the grime and stayed her hand. Cathy decided to wait for Phillip to get back from work before clearing space in the shed.
Phil, a coalminer, knows his metals. But even he was fooled by the dilapidated state of the thing in the milk crate when he had glanced at it weeks earlier.
“I remember kicking it to the side and going, ‘What’s that?’,” Phil says. “Oh, it’s a pile of shit.”
Then more oddities turned up in the shed. There was the plastic container full of what appeared to the untrained eye to be long, strange bullet casings.
A lightbulb went off and the Harths realised all the odd and heavy bits of metal were meant to be connected.
“Once we pulled it out and started putting it together, literally like a jigsaw puzzle, you kind of look at it and go: ‘This could be something’,” Cathy says.
“I’m looking at it going, ‘Oh, this would be awesome to put a pot plant in’,” Phil says.
But the more they scrubbed and assembled, the more the Harths were amazed.
The bullet casings, it turned out, were candles – 92 of an original 100. The metalwork began to shine through: an emu, a kangaroo, a white settler and an Indigenous man reaching out to shake hands. Then a name: James Steeth.
A quick Google revealed two things the silversmith had designed: the original Melbourne Cup and an object in the possession of the National Gallery of Victoria. The latter was a five-tiered clock cake made of silver and gold that looked remarkably like their own.
“We’ve looked at it again and gone: what the hell is this and why is it in the shed?” Phil says. “And that’s started our journey.”
After poring through archives and books, the Harths discovered they held a forgotten piece of Melbourne history. They learned the strange story of centenary celebrations in 1934, when the city commissioned what it claimed was the world’s biggest cake, a 10-tonne fruit cake made from 36,000 eggs and 4.5 tonnes of mixed fruit.
The dessert was replete with colonial symbolism, including a depiction of the unrecognised treaty between John Batman and the Wurundjeri traditional owners which paved the way for Melbourne’s settlement.
Steeth was commissioned to build a replica of the cake as a prize for a coupon competition – that was the object held by the NGV. So what was the Harths’ clock?
The Harths believe theirs to be the original, and the NGV’s a replica. Collett, Gibson’s senior consultant specialist, believes that, at twice the size of the NGV artefact, this one was put on public display during the centenary celebrations to advertise the cake and competition.
“It really is a piece of Melbourne history and deserves to be in an institution,” Collett says.
“But how it made its journey from here in Melbourne to out the back of nowhere near Rockhampton, we just don’t know.”
