Photo Recall: Just six, he wants to see this dragon life-size

Just six, he wants to see this dragon life-size.

For a 6-year-old boy, few days out could be more exciting than going to the national model-making championships.

Anthony Nyhane, wide-eyed as he inspected this winning depiction of Saint George and the Dragon in 1985, still remembers that day out with his dad.

Nyhane's father, Colin, had entered a miniature motorcycle in the competition. "It was in an action pose, it looked like it was going over a hill," Nyhane says.

"My old man made a lot of models from stuff he just had lying around, from scratch. It was always interesting, that's for sure, seeing what he could come up with."

But it was this brutalist dragon-slaying model that caught the eye of Nyhane and of Herald photographer Ben Motu.

Nyhane, now 35, says his father took him to several model competitions, which he thought were held somewhere on Auckland's North Shore.

"I just vaguely remember this photo because my Nana actually saved it until she died, but I haven't seen it in 20-odd years."

Nyhane is now a computer hardware technician at Dr IT's Custom Computers in Auckland.

He hopes to take his own son, Aiden, 3, to a model competition one of these days.

"It's just something that a young kid would enjoy."

The maker of the dragon model, Mary Maclachlan, went on to make miniatures for Lord of the Rings and King Kong after she won the national model-making championships.

Maclachlan, who was 32 at the time, says the model she made for the International Model Society of New Zealand competition was still alive and well, albeit a little fractured in places after several house moves. "I still have the ribbons it was awarded," she says.

Her take on the legendary scene showed the dragon constructing itself out of a rubbish pile. "The day when your trash comes back to bite you if you don't recycle more."

She retired from professional model-making after being made redundant from Weta Workshop in 2005.

"Now it's all digital this and computerised that; 3-D printers make models now. They don't need tea breaks."