Cast true to scale, down to the bedroll behind the saddle.

A nine-year-old rode his pony roughly 620 miles from Victoria to Sydney in 1932 to watch the Harbour Bridge open — then turned around and rode home. A life-size bronze in his hometown remembers both legs of the trip.

The reward came first, then the ride. In 1931, Lennie Gwyther’s father broke his leg, and the boy — nine years old, on the family farm outside Leongatha in Victoria’s South Gippsland — took over the ploughing and sowing until his father could work again. Asked what he wanted in return, Lennie didn’t pick a toy. He wanted to see the Sydney Harbour Bridge, then nearing completion, open.

He set out on 3 February 1932 on Ginger Mick, a pony he’d had since his second birthday — they shared the date. The route ran through bush tracks and country roads, roughly 1,000 kilometres (about 620 miles) one-way, covering something like 25 to 30 kilometres a day. He reached Sydney in time for the bridge’s opening on 19 March 1932, and Martin Place reportedly turned out 10,000 people to see him arrive. Along the way he’d stopped at Parliament House in Canberra, where Prime Minister Joseph Lyons shook his hand and had tea with him; in Sydney, Don Bradman gave him a signed cricket bat. A farm boy on a family errand had become, for a few weeks, one of the most photographed people in the country.

Then he rode home. Lennie talked his father out of shipping Ginger Mick back by rail and instead retraced the distance overland via the Hume Highway, turning ten somewhere on the road. Leongatha met him with a crowd of its own — smaller than Sydney’s, around 800 — but his, this time.

The statue that marks the story stands in Centenary Park on Leongatha’s Anderson Street, a life-size bronze of boy and pony unveiled on 14 October 2017, 85 years after the ride. It was paid for the way the town remembers Lennie: a federal community grant topped up by local fundraising. The facts alongside it need no embellishment. A boy did the work while his father couldn’t, asked for one specific thing as thanks, and covered roughly 1,240 miles of Australia on a pony to get it.