By George, he's got it ... in NZ

Who was Smith and what was his connection with mysterious, mystical Lake George? Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin to tell you.

In 1933, Lake George had been so empty and so dry for so long that it seemed certain it would never be a watery place again. Folk of the region, perhaps with ingenuity forced upon them by the Depression, began to dream of creating a Lake George speedway on that vast expanse of flatness.

In April 1933, there was a weekend meeting at Collector of members of the Collector Progress Association, the Canberra Publicity and Tourism committee and the Goulburn Chamber of Commerce. Their purpose was to try to give the Lake George speedway scheme a wriggle on. Their meetings were attended by an Australian who was a household name and who probably remains the most famous person to have ever visited Collector. He was motor speed champion Wizard Smith, who, at the time of his visit, was the holder of all sorts of motor speed records, but was especially the holder of the official world land speed record of 164.084 miles (264.06 kilometres) an hour. He promised the meeting that as soon as the proposed speedway was ready he would use it to make a swashbuckling attempt on the Australian 24-hour driving record.

His expert advice to the meeting was that the track should be circular and an enormous circle of eight to 10 kilometres. It should be surveyed, staked, rolled and watered into a firm, level, dirt track (he thought this could all be done for about £100) and should then be suitable for speed requirements. He said Australia at the moment had no such track (in 1926 he'd set a 24-hour record at the cramped Maroubra Speedway) but was sure that on a track like the one he was proposing he'd reach speeds of up to 240 kilometres an hour. The meeting ended in a flurry of optimism with a Lake George speedway committee formed and a decision made to contact local land owners to ask their permission to use their lands.

Alas, the track was never begun. Did the land owners turn out to be nimbys who refused to have their livestock frightened by roaring speed cars? Did the NSW government simply refuse to allow it to happen? Did capricious Lake George spoil things by mysteriously filling with water while of course, somewhere in China, another lake mysteriously emptied?

Had Smith ever been able to take his wizardry out on to a Lake George track, he would probably have done it in ''Anzac'', a vrooming brute of a car with a Cadillac chassis under whose long, broad bonnet he and his sponsor had fitted a Rolls-Royce aeroplane engine. It seems to have been in Anzac that he set several records, including those for the fastest drives between Australian cities. In 1933, the year of his Collector visit, he twice rocketed between Sydney and Melbourne. Alas, soon after, killjoy governments banned these dashes on safety grounds.

The fact that almost no one knows of the Smith today is an interesting instruction in how fleeting and temporary fame is. In his heyday, he was famous and accomplished, and other than Jack Brabham there has probably never been a more distinguished Australian chap behind the wheels of horseless carriages.

From 1923, he began to set inter-city records between all Australasian cities, including the long-distance record for the sustained sprint between Fremantle and and Brisbane.

In 1929, at Ninety Mile Beach near Auckland, he set an Australasian 10-mile (16-kilometre) record at an average speed of over 238 kilometres an hour. But he was always dreaming of greater and greater velocities, and using an engine from a seaplane, in 1929 he and a colleague set about building a huge, long, low, streamlined beast that would only be asked to streak in straight lines in search of speed records. And on Australia Day 1932, at wet and bumpy Ninety Mile Beach he set a seagull-scattering official world speed record of 264.06 kilometres an hour.

Eighty years later, that still seems, to those of us tootling to and fro in our Barinas, a supernatural speed.

It makes one wistful to wonder what Smith or any of his swashbuckling successors might have achieved on the flat lake bed of Lake George. It's 25 kilometres long and record attempts could have been made there (instead of New Zealand) if only that mysterious lake in China that, magically emptying, fills Lake George, had been kept plugged by the mischievous hobgoblins reported to control it.