Queensland couple find $50,000 birthday cake clock abandoned in their garage: 'I thought it looked a bit fancy'
- A couple found a cake clock in their garden shed
- They were cleaning out 'crap' left by the prior homeowners
- It turned out to be a remnant from the centenary of Victoria
A lucky couple have stumbled across a massive windfall after discovering an item worth $50,000 hiding in the rubbish left behind in their new house.
Cathy and Phillip Harth were cleaning out one of two garden sheds that came with their new property in rural Cawarral, near Rockhampton, in Queensland.
The couple eventually made their way to a discarded milk crate filled with rusting metal parts which Mrs Harth almost threw out.
'I looked at it and thought do we really need more stuff? Like we've already got enough crap that we carry around with us,' Mrs Harth told ABC.
Upon closer inspection however, she realised what she was looking at.
'Then I've wiped the front of it and I've gone, 'This looks like a damn clock',' Mrs Harth said.
'I thought it looked a bit fancy.'
Upon meticulously putting the pieces back together, the couple found that their new timepiece looked an awful lot like a birthday cake.
Once the clock was fully reassembled it stood 50cm tall and 40cm wide.
The five tier, 100-candle birthday cake sparked the curiosity of the Harths, who spent 'hours and hours' scouring the web for answer about what exactly it was celebrating.
Finally, the couple realised that they had found an original artefact from Melbourne's centenary celebrations which dated back to 1934.
'It could have easily gone to the dump but we had a few lucky breaks and really everything just fell into place,' Mrs Harth said.
After asking a couple of auction houses to inspect their new find, they were disappointed to hear back that auctioneers didn't think it was even worth the price of shipping for them to inspect the oddity.
Then in May, Gibson's Auctions, in Melbourne, excitedly got back to the homeowners informing them that they'd be thrilled to find the clock a new home.
The auction house regarded the artefact as 'extremely important' to the heritage of the Victoria and the country, according to their consultant, Dennice Collett.
'It's really one of those fake or fortune moments, [and] we call these things a barn or shed find. I've been in this industry now 10 years and this is probably the most fanciful and wonderful story I've experienced,' Ms Collett told ABC.
The opening bid was set at $30,000 by Gibson's, which was easily exceeded when 14 eager bidders began fighting for ownership of the unique item.
By the end of the day the bidding war was settled at $48,000, which left the Harths speechless.
The clock was originally made by famed silversmith J.W. Steeth and Son, who also designed and made the Melbourne Cup.
Officially known as the Centenary of Melbourne Birthday Clock Cake, the design features a wrapped mural at its base which pays tribute to early Australia.
Resting atop the first layer of the solid silver confectionary are the country's national animals, the kangaroo and emu.
'Birthday Cake' is written on the clock's face, replacing the numbers traditionally found to signify the time of day, and its arms are a dual pair of boomerangs.
In the centre behind the boomerangs is a bold blue '100' in lieu of the occasion, which is stamped onto the Coat of arms of Victoria.
The extravagant cake clock was designed to be a replica of a 10-tonne fruit cake, the world's largest cake at the time, which was also baked for the celebrations.
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