A Massey-Harris tractor has passed through three generations and three different states to call Mount Isa home.
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The proud owner, Darren Lutze, exhibited the relic at the Buffs Club Show’n’Shine event on Sunday.
It was the prized possession’s second outing since its extreme makeover.
The tractor had been in the Lutze family since Werner Lutze, Darren’s grandfather, first purchased it in 1958 in South Australia.
Old farmers just love the old tractors and the kids love shiny colours.
- Darren Lutze
Werner Lutze was a mixed cropping and sheep farmer on a property near Arthurton, slightly north-west of Adelaide. When Werner passed away in 1970, the tractor sat quietly in the shed for the next three decades.
His neighbours started it up a mere once a year or so to be used as a stationary motor to run a pump.
That was until Ray Lutze, Darren’s father, bought the tractor 10 years ago from the estate and moved it interstate to his property near Warracknabeal in Victoria’s north-west.
The tractor, which by this stage had reached 50 years of age, was “used to cut firewood and other general purpose light duties” according to Darren.
When the opportunity arose in the winter of 2012, Darren Lutze bought the tractor off his father.
Darren then transported the tractor from Victoria to its new home in suburban Mount Isa, after a 2650-kilometre journey on the back of a 1954 Ford truck; another Lutze family treasure.
“It was a heck of a road trip, let me tell you,” Darren recalled.
He then spent the next two years doing the Massey up as a passion project.
“Yeah I love it. You can take the boy out of the farm, but you can’t take the farm out of the boy,” he chuckled.
Darren said he hoped to restore the Ford truck too one day, as it was a vehicle he’d grown up with and one which was used to be drive him to school in.
The Massey-Harris 745 tractors were originally built in Scotland.
Darren said fully operational models are a rare find in Australia.
“You go on the internet and there’s a few, there’d be a few on people’s farms in their sheds, but I don’t reckon there’d be more than a dozen running in Australia,” he said.
As for the Massey’s popularity, Darren doesn’t see it fading anytime soon.
“I think it’s the nostalgia; the old farmers just love the old tractors and the kids love shiny colours.”
