Ford Falcon XC Cobra

Australia is home to the inland taipan, whose venom is the most toxic of any snake measured; the eastern brown, responsible for more fatalities on the continent than anything else with scales; the death adder; the tiger snake; and the coastal taipan. It has, by most reckonings, a higher proportion of venomous species than anywhere else on earth.

It does not have cobras.

In 1978, faced with a stock of unsold Falcon hardtop bodies and a coupé line about to end, Ford Australia built four hundred cars in Shelby colours — white with blue stripes — badged them Cobra, numbered each one on a dashboard plaque, and sold the lot. Some carried the 5.8-litre V8 and a competition-oriented option pack; those went on to race at Bathurst.

The Ophidiary raises an eyebrow and then lowers it. There is something magnificent about a nation with the world’s most dangerous native snakes choosing, for its run-out special, an animal from somewhere else entirely — purely because that animal had better stripes. It is the automotive equivalent of naming your dog after a lion.

And of course the badge on the nose said Falcon. Falcons and other raptors are among the most reliable predators of snakes worldwide. Ford Australia therefore built a car that names both the hunter and the hunted, in a country that has neither, in the colours of a third country, in a body shell that was about to be discontinued. It is the most beautifully confused vehicle in this entire book.