David,
to answer your question! I would say with out a doubt, the time I started to get an appreciation of how these men survived in these little tanks was when I had the first one hanging up on my crane and seeing just how small they were and how thin the metal was. Every part I made and the stories that came with some of the information was so unique and I am very privileged to have not one but two of these machines. I was just today speaking to the chap who salvaged these tanks many years ago and he himself is 94yo. His memory is not what it used to be but he recalled finding Bowerbird buried in a public tip in a small town called Heywood in Victoria.
He had been told about the tank some time before and went to the town to see what he could find. He told me today that he spoke to a local Tip scrounger who said he remembered the tank getting buried and he offered the scrounger a dozen bottles of beer if he identified the burial location and he did just that!
After the location had been approx pin pointed he proceeded to engage the services of a excavator and Bower Bird was quickly found upside down and not too far under ground. The operator dug around the hull and lifted it out and onto a trailer and was then taken to Narre Warren. Wombat was recovered from somewhere around Hamilton in Victoria, put on a trailer and he wrote Vickers Mkv1 on the back of the tank in chalk and again transported back to Narre Warren and put with Bower Bird. That it where they continued to sit for many years until they were acquired by me, brought back to Adelaide and as the saying goes, "The rest is history"
It is a common quote from people that inspect and stand in the turret.
{ "Hell, it sure would have been bloody cramped in here"}
Not to mention, noisy, smelly and tiring. Everything I have done with, in and around these little machines of history has most definitely given me an huge amount of respect, appreciation and knowledge what our past generation had to bare.
