The Whomping Willow is Real! Behold the Car in the Tree

The story is this.

Not long after we moved to our house in the Box-Ironbark forests of Central Victoria, a friend visited and went for a walk one day to explore the surrounds. Our block of land backs onto State forest which is basically empty government land, not managed particularly well. At different points paddocks make an incursion into the forest, a history of gold-mining and sheep farming in the region. The sheep farmers are still here, the gold miners ghosts merely tourist attractions.

She returned to announce that everyone should walk north and that we could not guess what we would find.

Well, we did go for that walk, and she was right. After about a mile walking through standard dry Australian bush, we came to a paddock that was deserted. There were no roads, no obvious access to this piece of land, except down the hill a good distance to what we assume is a farmer’s residence.

And, in the middle of this dry old sheep paddock stood a very large gun tree. And, in that gum tree a rusty old car from the 1970s. (Click on the image for full sized picture)

Find the full story of how this came to be, over the fold...

It was the stuff of internet spam. The type of image you would see floating from your friend into your inbox that would provide a 5 second chuckle before you started back at work. Yet, it was real.

We wondered how it might have come to live at LAT 37° 6'24.63"S LONG 144° 6'36.88"E (the tree foliage covers the car on Google Earth) in the middle of a sheep paddock surrounded by State Forest.

My family decided there were 3 options:

1. There had a some point been an amazing flood and the car had floated into the tree branches, once the water subsided, what was left was a car in a tree.

2. The car had parked over a mutant gum tree seedling which had grown naturally lifting the car into the air, hence a car in a tree.

3. A once in a lifetime twister had picked up the car and deposited it in the tree, and so we have a car in a tree.

Strange as it may seem to you, none of these were right.

In discussions with locals for months later we found out that there was a perfectly plausible explanation.

A local of the small town nearby had edited a hot rod magazine in the 1970s. He decided that a good shot for a front cover would be a car 10 meters up in a tree. He organized with a mate, a local sheep farmer, to bring a crane into an isolated paddock, place it in the tree, take a photo - and leave it there.

And so, I bring you - directly from our little patch of earth in rural Australia: the car in the tree.