Timing, it is often said, is everything. Get it right and you're a winner; get it wrong and it's back to making concrete.
A poignant reminder of that is a tiny little car which this week was rushed into the atrium of the National Museum of Australia as one of the country's grandest exhibition spaces was declared open for visitors once again as COVID-19 restrictions eased.
Cars fill a big, empty space better than most things and the museum has a number of extraordinary soaked-in-history vehicles which by curatorial standards, are relatively easy to wheel into place and allow people to stand around and admire.
The Lightburn Zeta is one of four vehicles which have come out of the museum collection and are now on public display.
The little Lightburn, made in South Australia in 1963, doesn't take up much space but when the opportunity arose to pull some "large technology items" out of storage and put them on show, the strange two-door microcar was a shoo-in.
With its fibreglass body and sliding perspex windows, the Zeta hasn't been seen publicly for 14 years and this one, still with the plastic on its seats from the factory, has just 150 miles on the odometer.
"It's been a dream of mine to have cars in the atrium and now it's happened; I'm so pleased," curator Laura Cook said.
The Zeta was made by Lightburn, a South Australian company which specialised in cement mixers and washing machines.
It was very much a product of manufacturing opportunism, conceived and rushed onto the Australian market after the Suez crisis of 1956 blocked off one of the world's major shipping routes and sent the price of petrol sky-high.
But Lightburn's timing and execution were simply awful.
Around the same time, the clever little Morris Minor was released and the British car had more of everything: four doors, a bigger, four-stroke engine, more space inside, a genuine boot - and cost just 100 pounds more than the Lightburn.
The two-stroke, two-cylinder 324cc Zeta - which required the owner to pre-mix the petrol and oil and pour it into the front tank - and its jail-cell spartan interior was simply no market match even though it could drive as fast backward as it could forward.
Less than 400 were sold - including an exceedingly rare ute and a torpedo-bodied sports model called the Frisky - before Lightburn quietly folded its car-making operation.
Together with the Zeta are four other marvellous pieces of Australian automotive heritage.
One is the 1913 Delaunay Belleville tourer with an interesting Canberra region connection.
The oldest car in the museum collection, it was imported by wealthy pastoralist James Osborne who owned the vast Bowylie station outside Gundaroo decades before the ACT came into being. The same property, now much, much smaller, is owned by Dick Smith.
When Osborne became bored of the car, he gave it to his station manager for a time until it became stuck in a local creek bed and stayed there before being recovered and restored.
Also on display in the atrium is Francis Birtles' Bean record-breaker, a simply gorgeous FJ Holden coupled up to 1956 Trailaway caravan, and a grand Crossley limousine used when the Duke and Duchess came to Canberra to open Parliament House in 1927.
