A Cairns couple has hailed the power of community for reuniting them with their loved one's ashes, which were lost and found in bizarre circumstances.
An urn containing ashes was found two weeks ago stashed in a microwave that had been donated to flood victims in the Cairns suburb of Holloways Beach.
Volunteers from Holloways Hub, a community-led recovery centre launched in the wake of December flooding, had been desperately searching for the owners since the unusual find.
"Somebody took the microwave home and they discovered [the urn inside a box] when they opened it up," Rennae Brant-Goodwin said.
"We posted it on our Facebook page but nobody came forward."
Until Wednesday.
How did an urn end up in a microwave?
Sandy Johns was listening to ABC Far North Breakfast radio when she heard about the urn's mysterious discovery.
"I heard Charlie say that somebody at Holloways had found an urn in a donated microwave and I thought, 'Oh my goodness. That's us'," Ms Johns said.
She was oblivious to the urn being missing but had recently donated goods, including the microwave, to the Holloways Hub, and remembered having put it into an old microwave for safe keeping.
"When we were putting stuff in storage, [we thought] that's going to be a really safe place," Ms Johns said.
"It's just going to be safe in there with extra protection and it's not going to get squashed.
"I had been thinking that I haven't actually seen them … I was a little bit troubled, but I thought, 'They have to be somewhere. We've just been super busy cleaning up after the floods'."
A special reunion
Within hours of the ABC broadcast, Sandy and Trevor Johns were reunited with the urn containing the ashes of Trevor's mother, May, at the Holloways Hub in a special yet unexpected moment for them.
"We're so grateful for broadcast and the people down at Holloways who reached out so that we we're able to get mum's ashes back," Ms Johns said.
"If it wasn't for all the community volunteers down [at the hub], this may not have happened."
Mr Johns only found out about the urn's remarkable lost-and-found journey after his wife heard the story on the radio.
"We were having coffee this morning and she says, 'Oh, by the way, this happened'," Mr Johns said.
"I'm still blown away … what are the odds?"
The Holloways Hub volunteers are also ecstatic they could reunite the Johns with the ashes, considering it a pleasant highlight in what had been an exhausting period helping their community recover from floods.
"Our eyes welled up a little bit when we heard that we'd found the owners [of the urn]," Ms Brant-Goodwin said.
"It's definitely been a wild ride and that wasn't on our agenda, trying to reunite families with ashes, but it's a beautiful ending to the story."