If Guinness World Records had existed in 1899 then Canberra pioneer Samuel Shumack (1850-1940) of Weetangerra would probably have leapt up to tell its editors all about his monster haystack.
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If not the biggest built in the colony it sounds certainly the biggest seen in the County of Murray. From his fond and detailed description of it in his Tales and Legends of Canberra Pioneers, the stack he and his men built that year was a colossus and an object of some wonder.
Faithful readers will know that this column has been wallowing in nostalgia for the days when the Canberra district was decorated with haystacks.
Those of us who love haystacks and those of us who worry that some might think this silly point to how we share that enthusiasm with the impressionist Claude Monet (we like to think of him as the patron and even the CEO of the Haystack Appreciation Society). The discerning Monet was fascinated by the beauty and individuality of haystacks and painted them again and again.
Readers have been enjoying our haystackery and now one has referred us to Shumack's special one that was crafted at ''Springvale'' at Weetangerra in 1899. If only we had a photograph of this painstakingly built mountain. Thank goodness, though, that builder Shumack painted a word picture of it.
He describes how it grew and grew until ''to complete this stack we had to lash three ladders together, one 31-feet long, one 22-feet long and one nine feet.
''I used 15,000 sheaves, none less than four and many five feet in length. The horse dray brought in six loads a day averaging 400 sheaves; the wagon brought 750 sheaves …
''To finish this stack, Ted Clark took up a dangerous position on the ladder halfway up the roof of the stack and he did his work well. He would catch the sheaves on his fork as they were pitched by Donnelly, and he would then hand them to me. The yield from this stack was 1000 bushels. When the stack was finished the report was circulated from one end of County Murray to the other, and farmers came from near and far to see it.''
If only Monet (1840-1926), who was at the peak of his painterly form in 1899, had, by magic, been able to be there with his easel at Weetangerra to paint this champion stack from all angles and in Canberra's ever-changing light!
Is it too much to hope that there is, somewhere in a mouldering album in a mouldering shed, a photograph of it taken by one of the bucolic pilgrims who travelled so far to see it?
Flowers brighten bus stop
This sturdy woman (she's two metres tall and weighs 400 kilos) with a robust bunch of flowers was a pioneer, perhaps even the pioneer in the suburb of Harrison.
Wednesday's column was decorated with Melbourne sculptor Dean Bowen's charming bronze work Bird Lover.
The sculpture is on display at the Beaver Galleries in Deakin, and the galleries' Martin Beaver was reminded of public works of Bowen's in Canberra, including this Lady With Flowers.
Beaver remembers with amusement that the bronze woman preceded the arrival of most of the new suburb's pioneers and stood alone at a bus stop.
Dean Bowen says she is the partner of The Big Little Man, which was installed in Civic in 2008.
Chief minister Jon Stanhope had the witty idea that to install her at a bus stop would imply that she is about to come in to Civic to meet Big Little Man or she is waiting with flowers to greet him.
