We know that God (aka Nature) planted the wild flowers with which Kosciuszko National Park is wondrously bedecked at the moment.
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As we write there are reported to be 67 species in flower there and one of the 67 is the Anemone Buttercup.
Yes, we know where the park's flowers come from but from whence cometh the park's lonely, abandoned, wilderness-surrounded 1934 Ford Ute?
At almost the same moment that the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage has alerted us, with pretty pictures, to the "Wildflower bloom in Kosciuszko right now" Canberra reader Bob Piper sent us his photograph of this old Ford. He's found it ensconced somewhere (he has told us where but we think it best to be coy) in Kosciuszko's dizzying immensity.
This very old-looking
Our conspiracy theory (involving a helicopter) is assisted by Piper's report that "How the vehicle got there is beyond me as it is a stiff walk and remote area ... I stood there by myself, miles from anywhere."
More of this particular car body/sculpture in a moment but first the reflection that an old car body alone in an alpine wilderness is one thing but that a car body in one's suburban street is quite another.
Once upon a time, down on my luck, I lived in a character-building corner of Tuggeranong (trust me, for I am a journalist, when I testify that it is true that pizza delivery businesses would not deliver to our street) where car bodies, sometimes burnt-out ones, occasionally adorned the neighbourhood. Perhaps (I've only just thought of this) they had belonged to ambushed pizza deliverers.
It turns out that Bob Piper, on one of his lone rambles stumbling across the abandoned vehicle/painstakingly installed sculpture, was just the chap to know what it was/what the sculptor's inspiration had been. Olde vehicles and especially olde Fords are one of Piper's enthusiasms. Nor are this particular wreck's sculpture-like qualities lost on him.
"The vehicle has tended to blend into the alpine landscape with its rusty colour on every panel. The doors, steering wheel, grille and tailgate are still there and only surface rusted. [But] the side valve V8 engine is gone.
"These vehicles are unique in that they were designed by Ford Australia and their then 22-year-old design engineer Lewis Brandt. The story goes that a farmer's wife wrote to Ford (Australia) around 1933 and asked for a vehicle that could be used all week by farmers but was also suitable for church on Sunday. So they designed and built it with some 345 of them coming off the production line in 1934. They cost £295. When Henry Ford heard about the vehicle he called it the 'Kangaroo Chaser.' "
Piper says that the design and production of this farm-useful ute was helpful to battling farmers. The Great Depression was underway and the banks, being especially cautious and niggardly, would only give farmers loans for farm machinery, but never for cars. But in this case the banks agreed that, yes, even if it was driven to church on Sundays the ute was a sort of farm machine, like a farm truck. In 1934 £295 was a lot of money for a farmer to borrow. Piper's best calculation is that it was something like $34,574 in today's shekels.
We won't tell you where the sculpture-lovely emeritus Ford is, but we do pass on the advice of the NSW office of Environment and Heritage that Kosciuszko's Rainbow Lake (a short walk) is brilliantly flower-bedecked at the moment. There are oodles of other spots too, and the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Services Jindaybyne and Tumut offices will point you to them. The Service's Alpine Ecologist Ken Green says he has counted 67 species presently strutting their floral stuff.
It baffles this columnist – a patriot and native plant enthusiast – why anyone would make an annual pilgrimage to the exotic, man-made horror of Floriade rather than an annual pilgrimage to Kosciuszko to see Australia's own flowers in a great natural garden landscaped by God (or Nature).
Discussion of the Kosciuszko region's amazing floriferousness reminds us of a touching flower story associated with the place.
On March 12, 1840, fortified by a lyre-bird supper the night before, Paul Strzelecki and his companion James Macarthur became the first Europeans to climb to Australia's most elevated place. Strezelecki, a Pole, promptly named the mountain after the Polish national hero Tadeusz Kosciuszko.
There or thereabouts Strzelecki picked a flower and later sent it to to Poland to the love of his life, Adyna Turno. Could it have been an Anemone Buttercup? But the neighbourhood boasts 212 flowering species and so his choice may have been vast.
He wrote "Behold a flower from Mount Kosciuszko. It is the highest peak in the continent, the first in the New World bearing a Polish name. I believe that you will be the first Polish woman to have a flower from that mountain. Let it remind you ever of freedom, patriotism and love."
Correction: An earlier version of this column referred to the flower shown as a Celmisia. This was incorrect.
