In good news, a silver clock, made in the shape of a birthday cake, to celebrate Melbourne's Centenary in 1934 has been rediscovered on a farm in Queensland.
Najma Sambul, reported in The Age on 20 June 2023, that -
It was found stashed away in a tin shed in coastal Queensland, dismantled and beginning to tarnish. But Cathy and Phillip Harth didn’t throw away the pieces of the old silver clock, which they would soon discover was a rare Melbourne artefact."I thought, ‘Oh, this is pretty nice to use as a pot plant’,” says Phillip of finding the clock on his farm in the rural town of Cawarral.
The clock is believed to be a second and larger version of the Melbourne Centenary Birthday Silver Cake Clock that is currently owned by the National Gallery of Victoria. True to its name, the Harths’ piece is solid silver and in the shape of a five-tier birthday cake and originally included 100 candles.
Both clocks were crafted by renowned Melbourne silversmiths James Steeth and Son, the makers of the Melbourne Cup, to celebrate Melbourne’s centenary in 1934-35. The smaller version, which is held in the NGV, was the grand prize of a competition during the centenary celebrations, but was never claimed by the competition winner.
The newly discovered clock was most likely the display version used during the celebrations. Nobody knows why it disappeared or how it arrived in Queensland. The Harths, who are from Queensland and have never lived in Melbourne, bought the 11-acre property in Cawarral last year.After realising the clock was a birthday cake and had the nameplate of Melbourne’s centenary emblazoned on it, the couple spent six months trying to uncover its origins. “For the first two months, no one believed we had it,” Phillip says. “People were coming back saying, ‘It’s not the one in the museum [National Gallery of Victoria] and that there isn’t a second one’.”
It took dozens of calls to museums, valuers, auctioneers and even the granddaughter of James Steeth to receive confirmation that they were in possession of the original clock. “The curator of NGV was the missing link,” Phillip says. “The NGV told us a clock was missing.”
The clock was restored by Gibson's Auctions of High Street, Armadale and was very nearly complete, just missing eight candles. It was estimated that it would reach between $30,000 and $50,000 when it went to auction in July 2023, and it sold for $48,000*.
Read the full report, Centenary cake a slice of Melbourne’s history found on Queensland farm by Najma Sambul, in The Age, here. Gibson's Auctions https://www.gibsonsauctions.com.au/
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