Country Roads: The 1957 Coonabarabran Speed Trials

The traditional complaint about American cars is that they're only fast in a straight line.

Well, what if that's all you're looking for?

(Source: Primotipo)

How Leonard got his Pennies
Defeat at Albert Park didn't dim Len Lukey's star in the slightest. The Melbourne-born businessman might've come to racing relatively late – aged 32, having already established Lukey Mufflers at 1142 Nepean Highway in Highett, Victoria – but many a slow start has been made up with some slick gear changes and opportunism. The sheer attitude with which Lukey attacked the racing scene made it clear this was not a man who let opportunities slip by.

Leonard Frank Lukey began his motor racing career in a 1953 Anniversary Mainline ute, which also happened to serve as his runabout on workdays. The ute was probably a better choice for racing anyway, given it was lighter than the sedan, but it came with the perennial utility handling defect – no weight over the rear wheels. Rocking up in 1954 for the inaugural meeting at the new Altona circuit (a swampy, snake-infested road ringing Cherry Lake, south-west of Melbourne), Lukey's inexperience gave him away when he bombed into the Esses at unabated speed and spun... right in front of Stan Jones' expensive new Maybach 2 Grand Prix car.

It's unclear whether the father of the famously combative Alan Jones had a few short words with Lukey, but either way CAMS (the Confederation of Australian Motor Sport, motor racing's governing body), voted to ban utilities from touring car racing shortly after, arguing that they were "inappropriate". Undeterred, Lukey switched to a navy-blue '55 Customline sedan (rego GJL-432), on the theory that neutral handling and V8 power covereth a multitude of sins. If nothing else, the lazy, pig-iron burble of its Ford Y-block would make a thrilling counter-note to the snarl of Holden sixes.

Lukey rounding the hairpin in the Melford Motors Trophy, a 5-lap sprint at Fishermans Bend, 12 February 1956. A lap or so later, while trying to run down Hurst's Delahaye, he ran out of brakes and speared off the track, rejoining chastened but undamaged. Also in the race was Jack Myers, his cream 48-215 sporting a green roof. Screengrab from the Ken Rankine footage linked below.

To make it into a racecar, Lukey turned to another motor industry insider with a taste for racing – Harry Firth. At this stage Harry was known more for his work with small British sports cars (apparently, he built twelve MG Specials during this period... plus a Triumph!), but Lukey knew his talents would apply just as well to a big American saloon. Most of his time was spent tidying up the minor mistakes inherent to a mass-produced vehicle: ensuring the internal clearances right, raising the compression ratio, and getting the oil surge under control. The suspension was stiffened with heavy-duty springs and Armstrong shock absorbers, and he also ported the cylinder heads for better flow and crafted a special high-performance valvetrain. The final touch was a set of Lukey's own high-flow exhaust extractors, which were especially designed to work with a huge pair of two-barrel carburettors adapted from a Ford truck. Harry claimed around 186 kW at 6,000rpm from his tweaked Y-block, which was good for a top speed above 190km/h with the right diff and gear ratios.

The only thing he couldn't do was reduce the Customline's immense weight, which left its cast-iron drum brakes overworked and prone to severe heat fade after just a few laps. Firth replaced them with new drums of his own design (cast locally, with integral fins to aid cooling), and fitted special Ferodo high-temp brake linings that only worked when hot, but braking zones remained the car's biggest weakness.

Still, Lukey started breaking records as soon as he gave the car its debut, at the Templestowe hill climb in Melbourne's outer east on Sunday, 3 July 1955. From there, he quickly set class records at Rob Roy and Hepburn Springs as well, then set the fastest time for a sedan over the quarter-mile (171.5 km/h) at the South Pacific Road Racing Championships meeting at Gnoo Blas, 30 January 1956. He also handily beat Jack Myers, an early iteration of the Holden-vs-Ford rivalry that also happened to play to the eternal bitterness between Melbourne and Sydney.

Lukey soon graduated to a front-engined Cooper-Bristol for Gold Star open-wheel racing, but he still used the Customline to contest the supporting touring car races (as the Cooper's tow car, he had to bring it along anyway!). He saw plenty of success, too, at least until the opening meeting of the new Phillip Island circuit on 15 December 1956. Here Lukey had one of his little mishaps, which this time had big consequences: the car rolled at the Southern Loop, and Lukey himself was lucky to crawl out from behind the wheel alive.

The car would need an extensive stay at the panelbeater's, so Lukey removed its Firth-fettled race engine, souped-up brakes and suspension and installed them in a new Olympia Blue 1956 model, which also became the Cooper's new tow car. Lukey simply picked up where he'd left off, contesting (and not infrequently, winning) his class in hill climbs and the touring car support races at any meeting where he was racing the Cooper-Bristol.

Then, in September 1957, he took it to the most unlikely place imaginable – a nondescript stretch of road cutting through the scrub between the towns of Coonabarabran and Baradine, in rural NSW.

The BP-COR Speed Trials
We've already noted how public outrage over their chicanery had forced the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company to rebrand as British Petroleum. What we haven't really covered were the knock-on effects here in Australia. The local branch of the company had been Commonwealth Oil Refineries, established in 1920 in partnership with the government of Prime Minister Billy Hughes. Now we were in the golden age of Menzies, however, the Party was just itching to offload its share so they could do what Liberals always do, privatise everything. The decision brought a howl of protest from Hughes – his final ever speech to Parliament – but the decision went through and the government's share was sold back to AIOC in 1952.

But the cost of the share buyback was substantial and, coupled with the 1954 rebrand as BP, necessitated an ongoing promotional blitz, one big enough to sustain them through the change and keep their new green-and-yellow signage in the public eye. One idea floated in early 1956 was to sponsor some Australian land speed record attempts – a publicity stunt of course, but one with at least a sheen of substance. BP commissioned one Graham Hoinville (a rally navigator, CAMS administrator and, not least, one of their own employees) to scout suitable locations, and after working through a shortlist he selected a six-kilometre section of dead-straight road linking Coonabarabran and Baradine, just north of the Warrumbungle National Park.

The Coonabarabran Shire Council and NSW Police agreed to the proposal, and arrangements were made to close the road for two days. First prize for the BP-COR Speed Trial was set at £275 (nearly $11,000 in 2024), with profits from the event going towards the construction of homes for seniors in Coonabarabran. The road itself was only 5.5 metres wide (it's not much wider today) and had a pronounced crown, bounded to the east by trees and to the west by the Gwabegar branch railway line and a string of telegraph poles, with additional hazards provided by the small dirt roads accessing the farms. The main industries in this part of the world were forestry and cattle grazing, and indeed the road ran right past the gates of Tipperary Station (not to be confused with the huge one in the Northern Territory): for the day, the spot became known as the Tipperary Flying Mile. Since it had recently been resurfaced there was no central white line and, considering this important, painters were brought in to apply one by hand – all five kilometres of it!

Officials looking exactly as professional as they were. Note the car battery powering the equipment! (Source: Primotipo)

Being at its core a big advertisement, only BP-contracted drivers were selected for the event. The "Racing Cars" category included Lex Davison's Ferrari 500/625, John McMillan's Ferrari 555 Super Squalo, and Len Lukey's immaculate Cooper T23 Bristol. "Sports Cars" counted Derek Jolly's Aussie-built Decca Mk.2 Climax, and Lukey's Olympia Blue Ford Customline. At the last minute it was decided to include motorcyclists as well, and despite the short notice they managed to get Jack Forrest (of Forrest's Elbow fame) and his ex-works BMW Rennsport 500, Trevor Pound (Eric Walsh's BSA Bantam) and Jack Ahearn, with his Manx Norton 350 and a 250cc NSU Sportmax. Sidecars were represented by Frank Sinclair's 1,080cc Vincent and Bernie Mack's Norton 500.

The first day – Saturday, 28 September 1957 – was warm and dogged by strong winds, either caused by or contributing to some nearby bushfires. Ideally, all record attempts would've been held in the cool of the morning for peak engine performance, but media demands meant they had to be held later in the day. That meant the morning was free for last-minute testing, which led to tragedy. Jimmy Johnson (not to be confused with the seven-time NASCAR champion), a Leichhardt garage owner by day, decided to give his MG TC Special one last test run shortly after dawn to check whether a persistent misfire had been sorted. Johnson arrived at the Tipperary Station gates around 6:30am at maximum speed – listening carefully to his engine, but his mind perhaps not fully on the road in front of him. Since the Trials hadn't officially begun the road was still open to normal traffic, and a fuel truck – just a speck in the distance a moment earlier – unexpectedly turned right to enter the Station, just as Johnson arrived on the scene. Johnson went underneath it and was killed instantly. The truck didn't have external rear mirrors, so its driver hadn't been aware of Johnson's advent until it was too late. It was an inauspicious beginning given the event hadn't technically started yet...

Despite the loss of Johnson, the bushfires and the winds – all of which threatened to cancel the event outright – there were still 3,000 spectators in attendance, which is a substantial proportion of the district today, never mind seventy years ago. As the winds were so blustery, motorcycle attempts were postponed until the Sunday. As per Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) rules, a record attempt would consist of two runs, one in each direction, which had to be made within one hour. Each run would be timed to the hundredth of a second. Cars would make their attempt over the flying kilometre, while bikes would be measured for a flying half-mile. John Crouch and George Hutchings were the official CAMS observers.

• Class C (3,001-5,000cc): John McMillan set an early benchmark with a pair of runs averaging 152mph (244.62 km/h) in his Ferrari 555 Super Squalo. The Super Squalo was named for its bulging fuel tanks, which did indeed give it a sinister, shark-like appearance, but like any proper Italian car it refused to perform without extensive spanner work first. For reasons unknown, McMillan and his mechanic and been forced to virtually rebuild the car the morning of the trials, so 152mph was a good result given absolutely zero testing. Victorian Ted Gray did his best to beat it in the Tornado 2 Chev, but couldn't get it to run properly and resigned himself to trying again on Sunday.

McMillan's Super Squalo (front), Davison's Starlet (middle) and Gray's Tornado (rear) being wheeled up to the starting line. (Source: Primotipo)

• Class D (2,001-3,000cc): Lex Davison's mount was a champion already, chassis 005, the very Ferrari 500 "Starlet" aboard which Alberto Ascari had won his two World Championships. Since then the car had been rebuilt as a Ferrari 500/625 with a 3.0-litre Monza 750 engine, and sold into Australia for Formula Libre use, meaning Lex had Class D all to himself. In-keeping with established Dunlop practice, he deliberately used half-worn tyres for his runs to minimise losses from overly-deep treads: the result was an average of 155.99mph (249.58 km/h), breaking the Class D record of 143mph comfortably.
• Class E (1,501-2,000cc): Len Lukey set his sights on the existing record of 113mph in his beautifully-prepared Cooper-Bristol. Len and his mechanics fitted a more slender nose to improve aerodynamics, and also sealed in the sides of the cockpit. Although thereby plagued with overheating, Lukey averaged 147.46mph (235.94 km/h) on his runs, which were voted the best of the meet.
• Class G (751-1,100cc): The existing Class F record of 103.5mph would've been Johnson's target had he survived, so in his absence the meeting moved on. Class G was the challenge set before South Australia's Derek Jolly, scion of the Penfold family of Barossa Valley wine fame. His Climax-engined Decca Mk.2 Special was one of only two Australian-built cars (and the only proper sports car) taking part that day. Modified by the fitment of a head fairing, his runs netted a combined 116.75mph (186.6 km/h), setting a new record.

Jolly racing the Decca at Port Wakefield. (Source: Primotipo)

• Class H (501-750cc): Cooper Cars Ltd had made their money (and their name) building small, study cars for Britain's native 500cc formula, which the FIA had recently adopted as Formula 3. The imminent rear-engine revolution was thus not the result of any deep naval-gazing on their part, but simple pragmatism: the cars were powered by motorcycle engines, which used a chain drive to get that power to the rear wheels. Putting the engine in the back just made everything much simpler. Jim Madsen's Cooper was powered by a slightly larger BMW motorcycle engine, however, so he went faster than a true F3 car, 109.97mph (174.8 km/h).
• Class I (351-500cc): Last but not least, Roy Blake climbed aboard a true Formula 3 car, a Cooper-JAP owned by Steve de Bord. Australians weren't shy about racial epithets in those days ("those days..."), but in this case the "JAP" referred its 500cc motorcycle engine, built from the soon-to-be-defunct John Alfred Prestwich Industries. Despite an engine, "about half the size of a Morris Minor," Blake cut the traps at an impressive 102.47mph (164.8 km/h).

As an extra bit of excitement, Len Lukey unhitched his new Olympica Blue '56 Cusso and went to town with it, sealing up every crack with masking tape, enclosing as much of the radiator as he dared, and placing pointed cones over the headlights to eliminate these virtual parachutes. The car was so buttoned up he had to climb in and out via the window, but the result was phenomenal, stopping the timers with an opening run of 130mph (209 km/h)... aided, admittedly, by a tail wind. Even so, the average of his two runs was still better than 123.3 mph (198.4 km/h), of which the official results noted admiringly: "This is the fastest speed yet recorded in Australia by a saloon car." And observers at the time said, if BP's antiquated timing equipment hadn't been on the blink, it might've been even faster.

Lads in Leather
By Sunday, 29 September, the winds had mercifully abated, and the bikes finally got their chance. Jack Ahearn rode three different machines that day, his most notable runs taking the 251-350cc Solo class on his Norton Manx 350 at 125.68 mph (202 km/h), and the 175-250cc class with his NSU Sportmax at 121.25mph (195 km/h). Frank Sinclair took the big 1,200cc Sidecar class with his Vincent HRD at 124.25mph (199 km/h) with Bernie Mack's "newly-acquired" Norton making easy work of the 500cc Sidecar class at 122.22mph (196 km/h). Jimmy Guilfoyle was unlucky after clocking 124mph on his streamlined 350cc BSA Special (BSA meaning Birmingham Small Arms Co.), as gusting winds prevented him making a return run. Trevor Pound (riding Eric Walsh's 123cc BSA Bantam) was equally unlucky, clocking 103mph in one direction but unable to make a return run within the required time due to a faulty magneto.

But the ride of the day surely belonged to Jack Forrest. Born in Wellington, NSW in 1920, he was known to be a brave man who lived large, and briefly held the title of fastest man in Australia. In an effort to raise the gearing of his BMW Rennsport, Jack and his mechanic Don Bain had fitted a larger-section rear tyre. Unfortunately, on his first run along the Tipperary Flying Mile, centrifugal force swelled the tyre so much that it jammed against the swinging arm, melting the rubber, locking the rear wheel and leaving a black skid mark on the road that was still visible over a year later. With the clock ticking and no other tyres available, Baradine garage owner Vane Mills stepped up and vulcanised the spot where the tyre had worn through to the canvas. With this bodged-up rear tyre, Forrest climbed back on his bike and roared through the speed traps at 152mph, despite the BMW developing an almost uncontrollable tank-slapper. Forrest set a new outright motorcycle record of 149mph (239.8 km/h) despite the ruined rear tyre, handling woes and, oh yeah, an encounter with a flock of galahs that left visible damage on the front fairing.

Forrest after the Run: note the galah-divots. (Source: Primotipo)

Bi-State Tornado
The star of the event, however, ended up being Ted Gray and his home-brewed Tornado 2 Chev. A Wangaratta native, Gray had made some headlines in 1946 when he recorded a 73mph average speed (117 km/h) on the trip from Wangaratta to Melbourne to win a bet. In those days the Hume was a simple two-lane country road, a world away from the poor man's autobahn it is today, so Ted must've driven with some attitude to manage that time. But he was probably quite familiar with the route, as his home and motor dealership were in Wangaratta, but at least one account mentions an engineering shop in Little Bourke Street (today the heart of Melbourne's Chinatown).

The original Tornado chassis (retroactively the Tornado 1) had been built by Gray to compete in local Formula Libre events. Typical of the time, it was a real bitza – Lancia stub axles, Peugeot steering rack, even the brake mechanism from a World War II P-51 Mustang – but the centrepiece was of course its engine. A Ford Mercury V8 bored and stroked to more than 5.0 litres, with locally-cast aluminium pushrod heads to replace the side-valve originals and – a first for Australia – fuel injection. This was the responsibility of Gray's partner in crime, Lou Abrahams.

The Tornado 1 made its debut at Gnoo Blas, Orange in January 1955, but its career was cut short before the end of the year. Gray and Abrahams took it to the NSW Road Racing Championship at Mount Panorama that October, and virtually wrote it off in a monster shunt Gray was lucky to escape alive. Rather than try to rebuild the car, they decided to salvage what they could and build something better.

Abrahams got to work on the Tornado 2 while Gray was recovering from his injuries in hospital (a process that took six months). The new car was a conventional ladder-frame design that inherited the original's Peugeot steering, Lancia stub axle and Holden suspension components, the Halibrand diff, Ford engine and gearbox. The P-51 Mustang braking system however was junked in favour of conventional drums-all-round system, built by Paton's Brakes in Melbourne, later a Repco subsidiary. It was clothed in a fibreglass body painted deep blue, with a red ring around the radiator inlet.

The car returned to the track well before its driver, contesting a handful of minor events with Ford power, but late in 1957 Gray and Abrahams replaced the ageing Mercury V8 with a 283ci Chevy small-block, as seen in Chevrolet's post-1955 Corvettes. Exactly how Gray got his hands on a Corvette engine in 1957 is something I'd love to know: Primotipo says it was, "sourced using contacts of Abrahams and Jack Mayberry at Holden," which is good but frustratingly vague. GM-H offered Chevrolets, Pontiacs and Vauxhalls as prestige buys above their bread-and-butter Holdens, but even so Chevy small-blocks couldn't have been thick on the ground at that time. A clue might be the so-called "Carter Corvette", which was a similar project built a year later by Murray Carter: he originally planned to build a Formula Libre car using conventional Holden Grey power, but Melbourne car dealer Boyanton Motors was able to offer him a 283 after a customer ordered one for a power boat, then went bust. However they got their hands on it, the Chevy V8 was an obvious upgrade over the Mercury – lighter, designed for overhead valves from the beginning, and there were plenty of parts on sale in the U.S. if you were looking for more performance.

With the Speed Trials starting on 28 September, however, Gray and Abrahams were left with only a week to adapt the Chevy to the Ford gearbox, fit the fuel injection system and get the whole ensemble running. The car was actually taken off the trailer during the 1,000km tow to Coonabarabran and driven over 300km on public roads to run the engine in! By all accounts it sounded like a Formula 5000 car, which must've stood plenty of hairs on necks along both sides of the Tipperary Flying Mile. Gray fitted the Tornado with a 3:1 final drive ratio and 19-inch wheels, aiming for a speed above 160mph.

Gray and the Tornado beginning their run. (Source: Primotipo)

Sadly, magneto dramas limited the engine to 5,300rpm, well below its intended redline. To compensate, overnight the team lowered the final drive to 2.8:1, and in this spec Ted achieved 157.53mph (253.5 km/h) on the Sunday to take the outright record from Davison's Ferrari. 157mph was faster than any Australian motorist would be able to go for quite some time yet.

There's some controversy over whether the BP-COR Speed Trials counted as genuine Australian record attempts (it will surprise nobody to report there were question marks over procedures on the day), but changes to the FIA's methods in 1983 render it a moot point anyway. As a promotional campaign, however, the meeting was a roaring success, and BP were very proud of what had been achieved, noting in their official release:

As the list of results shows, each of the competitors achieved a performance of which he can be very justly proud and it is obvious that a great deal of painstaking effort and skill was lavished on the preparation of each of the machines.

Also the enthusiasm and willing co-operation of all competitors, despite certain unavoidable difficulties, contributed very largely to the outstanding success of this meeting.

Today
I was recently able to make a pilgrimage out to the Tipperary Flying Mile (this being my neck of the woods, it's not such a long way after all...). I was hoping some of it might've matched up with photos from 1957, but of course, it doesn't. Trees grow, die, and then grow again too fast, and who knows how many times the road's been resurfaced in the decades since then? But it was nice to stare back up the infinite straight and imagine brave men roaring towards me in machines they'd cobbled together themselves, with the driver (or rider) himself considered to be the crumple zone, at speeds never before witnessed in this country. It's difficult to imagine.

The entry to Tipperary Station today. It should feel spooky remembering that a man died on this spot, but in truth it's not unusual for the roads out here to feature crosses. (Own work.)

What I didn't expect was to be equally distracted by the railway line. This section of the Gwabegar line only opened in 1923, after which it was maintained by (among others) one of my great-grandfathers. A fettler by trade, he worked to keep the line humming in the dark days of the 1930s, sometimes necessarily dragging along his young daughter (who I’m sure was an unholy nightmare even at that age). She later told stories of those days her son – my father – who then passed them on to me. So it was nice to take some time and walk a little way along the rails, sidestepping the small pines (the section above Coonabarabran closed in 2005), wondering if this spike or that sleeper had been laid down by my forebear, unlikely though it is. Grandma grew up to love Waratah motorcycles, so she certainly would've taken notice of the record attempts along the road where she used to play, and I'd love to hear her thoughts about it today. Sadly, I never knew to ask her while she was alive.

(Own work.)

 

Nevil Shute's "On The Beach": A Very Fifties Apocalypse

Content Warning: Includes discussions of suicide, and euthenasia of a child.

On The Beach is not a famous novel ("famous" in this context defined as, "even people who don't read books have heard of it"). But it's still pretty well-known, and I was prompted to track it down in dead-tree format after happening across Liam Pieper's mid-pandemic essay, On the Resolute Nihilism of an End-Times Classic. Pieper neatly described it as, "...a strange, dark novel – no plot and all coda … a book without villains, without antagonists, without conflict." Just the bleak inevitability of certain death, approaching at its own steady, measured pace.

Source: JSTOR Daily

For those who mightn't know, On The Beach is a 1957 novel written by British immigrant Nevil Shute, set in the not-too-distant future of 1963. It’s been roughly 18 months since World War III, a "short, bewildering war … of which no history had been written or would ever be written now." Atomic bombs have completely annihilated the northern hemisphere, and now all that radiation is slowly making its way south, drifting on the trade winds and poisoning everything in its path. Basically, it's HBO's Chernobyl if they never put the fire out.

Our dramatis personae are: Lieutenant-Commander Peter Holmes, a young RAN officer who loves his family and the sea in roughly equal measure; his wife Mary, a rather sexist caricature of a dutiful 1950s housewife, who spends most of the book in the denial stage of grief; Commander Dwight Towers, an American submarine captain whose crew survived the war, but whose wife and children were back in Connecticut; Moira Davidson, another sexist caricature, this time of a good-time girl who is nevertheless the most sympathetic character in the book; and Professor John Osborne, a CSIRO scientist who initially tags along to be the Spock to Dwight's Kirk, but slowly develops more personality than either of our two leads.

They're characters, barely, but they're not heroes, as their circumstances leave them without agency: there's nothing for them to do. The closest thing we have to a plot involves a pair of long-distance cruises aboard Dwight's command, the USS Scorpion, but there's no jeopardy to it because everyone already knows what they'll find. Everybody in the north is long dead, and everyone in the south will be following them soon enough. The only thing left to do is decide how to spend the handful of months they have left, months that become weeks, then days...

The War to End All of Everything
Shute's vision for World War III involved such an absurd sequence of events that I can only conclude the absurdity was the point. The first time we hear of it, he tells us very little:

...[Towers] learned for the first time of the Russo-Chinese war that had flared up out of the Russo-NATO war, initiated by Albania. He learned of the use of cobalt bombs by both the Russians and the Chinese...

At first I had to assume this was meant to reflect the confusion of events that moved too fast for anyone on the ground to keep up. Shute lived through both world wars, after all, and surely knew the strange texture of front pages full of propaganda, guesses, disinformation and the occasional stray bit of truth that slipped past the censors. During Scorpion's first cruise, Osborne and Towers discuss the war in more detail, Osborne revealing at least 4,700 devices were detonated if the seismic readings are to be believed – probably more. Which was a pretty pessimistic estimate when the novel was being written, as that would've been pretty close to all the nuclear weapons ever built. By the real 1963 however, the U.K. had 211 warheads, the Soviet Union just over 3,300, and the United States more than 25,000, which makes Osborne's numbers seem positively Polyannish. The expansion of the U.S. arsenal in the late 1950s was a feat of genuine insanity.

Although the Soviet stockpile was hardly comforting either. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The war supposedly started because Moscow needed a warm-water port (nothing ever changes...), their strategy to depopulate northern China so they could move in and take Shanghai; the Chinese counter-strategy was to revert the Soviets back to a pre-industrial people with no need for Shanghai. Both strategies involved blanketing large areas of the world with radioactive fallout, which brings about the consequences our cast spends the rest of the novel dealing with. It's worth noting, however, that although the novel technically has an omniscient third-person narrator, said narrator stays locked to our core characters and never weighs in on these matters. John Osborne has the seismic readings, but he doesn't actually know how the war was waged; similarly, Dwight Towers knows what the intel experts were predicting only weeks before his final cruise, but has no way of knowing if that's what actually happened. We only see what our main characters have see, hear what they’ve heard, so we’re allowed only a ground-level view of these vast events, creating a sense of realism and no small amount of claustrophobia. It's ironic that we feel most free during the chapters spent cooped up in a nuclear submarine – at least for that time we’re doing something.

That narrow, subjective view however is the only thing that salvages the weirdness that comes next. So far the course of events hasn't involved Britain at all, and for our extremely British author that cannot be allowed to stand. It takes a leap of imagination, but Shute finds a way to get nuclear weapons on London – a false-flag attack from that noted nuclear power, Egypt.

"The very first attack. They were Russian long range bombers, Il 626s, but they were Egyptian manned. They flew from Cairo."

"Are you sure that's true?"

"It's true enough. They got the one that landed at Porto Rico [sic] on the way home. They only found out it was Egyptian after we'd bombed Leningrad and Odessa and the nuclear establishments at Kharkov, Kuibyshev, and Molotov. Things must have happened kind of quick that day."

The Ilyushin Il 626 is a fictional aircraft, but it's also the least implausible part of that exchange. We don't need to look far for a reason a British author might be hostile toward Egypt, but come on. Ol' Nasser really must've been the Saddam of his day (as far as being the west's bogeyman, at least).

"The first one was the bomb on Naples. That was the Albanians, of course. Then there was the bomb on Tel Aviv. Nobody knows who dropped that one, not that I've heard, anyway. Then the British and Americans intervened and made that demonstration flight over Cairo. Next day the Egyptians sent out all the serviceable bombers that they'd got, six to Washington and seven to London. One got through to Washington, and two to London. After that there weren’t many American or British statesmen left alive."

So the course of this war is a bit strange, even a bit silly, but I'm still fairly sure that was the whole point. Events were confusing, and major decisions had to be made on the spot by low-level commanders. I have to wonder if a fair bit of this book is actually leftover trauma from the Second World War rather than anxiety about a Third. Shute didn't immigrate to Australia until 1950, but his description of the radiation coming south, of the cities of the Pacific going dark one by one, it sounds a bit like an echo of the nightmare days of 1942, when Hirohito's finest were popping up everywhere and seemed unstoppable. Similarly, his description of a society suddenly without oil hits harder when you remember petrol rationing wasn't that far in the past.

The Scorpion's Tale
I was a bit taken aback to realise Dwight Towers was the commander of USS Scorpion (SSN-589). Scorpion was launched in 1959, a couple of years after the novel's publication, and it sailed until 1968 when it was lost in an incident the U.S. Navy has never deigned to clarify. Someone almost definitely knows what happened, but speculation is rife that the Americans and their Soviet counterparts agreed not to talk about it publicly, so we'll probably never know. What we do know is that, along with USS Thresher, it was one of the two submarines Robert Ballard was searching for when he found the wreck of the Titanic in 1985 (the Navy's deal was, more or less: "We'll need a cover story so the Red Fleet doesn't come snooping... Titanic? Perfect! We'll even let you use any leftover budget to search for real, as long as you find our subs first...").

Scorpion's launch in Connecticut, 19 December 1959. (Source: Wikipedia)

Scorpion was highly-classified military tech at the time, but Shute still makes her sound far more advanced than she actually was. Holmes ends up seconded as Australian liaison aboard the American vessel, and early on he takes a tour of her engine spaces:

[Peter] had never served in an atomic powered ship, and as much of the equipment was classified for security a great deal of it was novel to him. He spent some time absorbing the general layout of the liquid sodium circuit to take heat from the reactor, the various heat exchangers, and the closed-cycle helium circuits for the twin high-speed turbines that drove the ship...

Nevil Shute had an engineering background, so he likely had contacts within the emerging nuclear industry who could pass on rumours of what was in the pipeline. The sodium-cooled reactor wasn't made up like the Il 626 (it was an experiment briefly tried in the 1960s), but it would've been massive overkill for a mere attack submarine. Sodium's big advantage is that it runs hot, allowing it to transfer much more energy in high-output use cases, but it comes with matching disadvantages – such as the fact sodium explodes when it touches water. Might not be the best thing to put on board a Navy vessel, especially when they don't need nearly as much power as an entire city. The real Scorpion ran a very basic water-cooled S5W reactor, because that was all she needed (sound military reasoning, I'm sure you'll agree, especially when it would be maintained by edgy 19-year-olds).

There's some irony that the only vessel capable of traversing the rad zone is a nuclear sub. With spicy rocks providing infinite electricity, Scorpion was able to make drinking water and breathable oxygen out of seawater, so the only limit on her endurance was food stores (today, the standard line about how long a nuclear sub can stay submerged is, "120 days, or 5 days after the coffee runs out"). Their first cruise is a simple recon trip up Australia's east coast and around the Top End, checking in on Cairns, Port Moresby and Darwin. Darwin would've looked much like it did in Baz Luhrman's Australia, but the mention of Cairns and Green Island cut deep for Yours Truly. We as a family went on holiday there in 2000 to get away from the Sydney Olympics, and made some fantastic memories along the way. The whole section reads like a reverse Mary Celeste, where the ship is inhabited and it's the rest of the world that's eerily vacant – except we know why everyone's gone in this story. The radiation levels are so high an unshielded person would survive only a few days in Cairns, and even less in Darwin.

The Saline Solution
The thing that made me want to read On The Beach was the question of radioactive fallout: What did Shute know, in 1957? When did the public become aware that atomic bombs weren't just big firecrackers, and a radioactive Sword of Damocles was now dangling over all our heads? Because it manifestly wasn't 1945.

The guru on this stuff is of course Alex Wellerstein of the Nuclear Secrecy blog, and way back in 2012 he wrote about who knew about radiation sickness, and when. The scientists who developed the bomb certainly knew there'd be radiation effects, but apparently that intel never got passed up the chain.

J. Robert Oppenheimer never seemed to be very interested in that. Why not? It remains something of a mystery — how do you find out why someone wasn't interested in something? ...

Because Oppenheimer didn't know/care about radiation effects, General Leslie Groves didn't really, either. Groves actually thought he could march American troops through an area that was recently atomic bombed — had he been given the opportunity to do so, his ignorance would have actually cost American lives.

If Groves didn't know/care, then the Targeting Committee and Interim Committee, Secretary of War Henry Stimson's turf, didn't know at all. If Stimson didn't know, Truman didn't know. … They didn't really care, they didn't really know, and it never got passed up.

So I did some digging, expecting the tipping point to be the Crossroads Baker test, or maybe Castle Bravo (which I've briefly mentioned before). But the real moment appears to've been a radio broadcast by physicist Leó Szilárd on 26 February 1950. The true author of the Einstein-Szilárd letter, which kicked off the Manhattan Project (Einstein merely signed it to give it some clout – celebrity endorsements aren't new), Szilárd was a pacifist who, in the post-war world, was vigorously campaigning for nuclear disarmament. He was trying to scare us straight, warning that nuclear weapon technology would soon reach the point where we could end human life on Earth. I've been able to find neither a recording nor a transcript of this broadcast, sadly, but all the sources agree this was when Szilárd described the cobalt bomb, also known as the "salted" nuke – as in salting the Earth, to ensure nothing could ever grow there again. Which handily also answered my question about why this book (and films like Dr Strangelove) were all obsessed with cobalt.

The 27th element, cobalt is named after kobold, the German word for "goblin", because miners in the Holy Roman Empire found its bluish ores were poor in known metals and gave off toxic arsenic fumes when smelted. When isolated in 1735, it was the first new metal to be discovered since antiquity, and was named "cobalt" in honour of those long-suffering German miners. The human body needs it in trace amounts, as it's a component of Vitamin B12. Virtually all natural cobalt is Cobalt-59, a stable isotope with 27 protons and 32 neutrons. But if you place it beside a neutron source – say, a working nuclear reactor – it can absorb an extra neutron and become Cobalt-60, one of the most dangerously radioactive substances on Earth. Cobalt-60 has a half-life of 5.27 years, or right in the sweet spot to be harmful to humans – any shorter and it wouldn't hang around long enough to cause trouble (nuclear blasts result in some seriously spicy fission products, but they're virtually gone within 72 hours), any longer and the radiation would be so mild it's barely above background. Instead, Cobalt-60 emits three main decay releases, one beta and two gamma – and the gamma decays both have extremely high energy. For this reason, cobalt rods are engraved with one of the most famous warnings in the industry: "Drop & Run".

Some joke it should just read, "You Poor Bastard".

At the time of Szilárd's speech, cobalt rods were just being introduced as sources for radiotherapy machines – a revolution in cancer treatment – so the element was already in the public eye. Szilárd theorised that it wouldn't be hard to jacket a nuclear weapon in stable cobalt and let the neutron release of the explosion convert it all to Cobalt-60, which would then be vapourised and carried on the winds to God-knows-where.

According to Wellerstein (again), a 30-year-old physicist named Frederick Reines did some back-of-the-envelope calculations back in 1947 to work out what it would take to irradiate the entire planet. Assuming a uniform spherical shell around the Earth (that "spherical chickens in a vacuum" joke is barely an exaggeration), he worked out that it would take a staggering 900,000 devices to give the entire world acute radiation sickness, or ARS. However, the only devices available in 1947 were Fat Man implosion bombs of around 20 kilotons, so...

That does, however, work out to "only" 18,000 megatons, which, in the thermonuclear age, is not so much after all – that is less than the peak megatonnage of the US Cold War nuclear stockpile.

That equation becomes even less comforting if you're talking salted bombs. Theoretically, around 500 tons of cobalt would be enough to cover the the Earth to a density of 1 gramme per square kilometre, with each gramme producing half a gray (0.5 Gy) of ionising radiation per minute (I know, I can hear physicists groaning in the background, but for our purposes we'll say 1 Gy equals 100 Roentgen. Yes, I know they're measuring different things). So 0.1 Gy would raise your lifetime fatal cancer risk but otherwise be unnoticeable; 1 Gy results in radiation sickness and unambiguous spikes in cancer rates; 3-5 Gy for just six minutes would kill half the population within 30 days; 10 Gy would mean 100 percent mortality rates within days. The timescale in the book, with total mortality occurring within a fortnight, seems consistent with exposures somewhere in the 8-10 Gy bracket.

It goes without saying, but ARS is one of the worst ways to die imaginable. Early symptoms include headaches, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, fever and skin reddening (i.e. radiation burns). Following this there may be a latency period where the patient seems to recover, sometimes known (without the slightest hyperbole) as the Walking Ghost Phase. With sufficient medical care, such a victim might live long enough to die of thyroid cancer or leukaemia instead, though at higher doses it starts to get ugly. Like Chernobyl firefighter ugly. If you really want to traumatise yourself (and I mean that literally – genuine content warning here), look up what happened to Japanese nuclear worker Hisashi Ouchi in 1999. Yes, the man who suffered the most agonising, drawn-out death in history was named Ouchi; this reality is being written by a hack.

Everybody's Dead, Dave
Later in the book, Towers takes Holmes and Osborne for another cruise across the Pacific, this time to investigate an intermittent Morse signal coming from a naval base in Seattle. It's not a coherent signal – they speculate it might be a lone survivor never trained to use a Morse set – but it's still a signal, which requires power, and there isn't supposed to be any power up there. Of course, it turns out to be nothing. The bombs haven't touched the nearby hydroelectric plants, so the power grid is still live, and it just happened that a window blown open by the blast is now depressing the key of a Morse transmitter. Every time the wind blows, the window rocks, transmitting gibberish. With that, the last flame of hope is extinguished, and our trio sail back to Melbourne and, effectively, become unemployed. There's nothing else to do now but wait for the end to come.

The grimmest thing anyone could do is introduce a child into this situation, so of course that's what Shute did. Peter and Mary's baby daughter Jennifer is just starting to crawl (by the end of the book she's teething as well); Mary steadfastly refuses to confront what's about to happen to herself and her baby. She has Peter bring her home a playpen (on the tram, no less), then frets that it's painted green, which contains toxic verdigris ("No, it's Duco. She'd need to have acetone in her saliva to get that off."). When a case of measles breaks out on the sub, she makes Peter sleep outside to avoid giving it to Jennifer. When Peter, gently, explains how to use the provided syringe to euthanise Jennifer when the time comes, she flies into an incandescent rage. H.P. Lovecraft famously wrote: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." He was talking about a gigantic semi-divine squid monster, so we may be grateful he never lived to see the nuclear age: the horror would simply have been out of his league.

Letting her have her delusions, Peter obediently helps Mary plant a garden they'll never see, while Dwight and Moira carry on with their awkwardly chaste non-affair. That leaves John Osborne to save us by growing a personality. Late in his life (perhaps stimulated by the 1956 Albert Park meetings), Nevil Shute was bitten by the racing bug, and his new passion was written into On The Beach. Before the cruise to Seattle, Osborne shows off his new toy, a shiny red Grand Prix Ferrari: "It's the one Donezetti raced the year before the war," he says proudly. "The one he won the Grand Prix of Syracuse on." (Some echoes of Brooklands, there? The traditions of horse racing survived longer at Brooklands than anywhere else. Drivers were distinguished by coloured jersies rather than numbers, and were said to sit "on" their cars rather than in them.) Well, the Syracuse Grand Prix was real, but there was never a piloti named Donezetti (intriguingly, there was a Luis Donizetti, but he was a Brazilian F3 driver from the '90s). Although descriptions are vague, it's clear what Shute was imagining was a front-engined car, so despite all his engineering nous apparently not even Nevil Shute saw the rear-engined revolution coming.

Which is a shame, because if it was from the 1961-'62 era, that would make it one of the iconic Ferrari 156 "Sharknoses". (Source: Ferrari Fan Club of Riga)

This machine Osborne intends to race in the final Australian Grand Prix, to be held at the fictional Tooradin circuit, presumably located near the town of Tooradin in South Gippsland. In geography it sounds like a loop of country roads, but in layout it sounds suspiciously similar to Phillip Island, which had opened a few years prior. We only see one of the qualifying heats, but it plays out as almost the platonic ideal of a motor race: with nothing to live for after the finish, everyone involved pushes to the absolute limit, with the result that even a mere heat ends with multiple fatalities. There's a scene later on where some paperwork needs to be signed in a hurry, so as the only person in the room with a functional car, Osborne acts as courier, roaring around the streets of Melbourne in the Ferrari – the 1950s version of that infamous scene from Driven, I suppose. He does end up winning the Grand Prix, but it occurs off-screen, our heroes hearing about it on the radio – as if to underscore that this, too, does not matter.

At the last, we start hearing cases of radiation sickness in Canberra, and John reminds us that the official announcements are always a few days late: through his CSIRO connections, he's able to reveal there are already cases in Albury. In effect, the radiation is already here: their time is up. One by one they start to feel sick, struck by bouts of vomiting or diarrhoea. The Australian government has already distributed the necessary suicide pills, so all that remains is to decide when to take them. Osborne swallows his sitting at the wheel of his beloved Ferrari; Peter and Mary Holmes give little Jennifer a needle, then curl up in bed together to take theirs. Dwight Towers and a skeleton crew take the Scorpion out to international waters to scuttle her, wary of leaving tech like that lying around for just anyone to find. And Moira...

I've barely talked about Moira, but she's easily the most likeable character in the entire story. People have criticised Shute for writing female stereotypes, but I don't think that's the whole truth. Moira is dragged into the story by the Holmeses, her mission (should she choose to accept it) to keep Dwight company and make sure he's kept too busy to grieve over his lost family in Connecticut. Throw a whore at him, in other words; a loose woman, a party girl. Except she kind of isn't. When we meet her she's a hard-drinking twenty-something (what other kind is there?), but she and Dwight never quite get together. Their quasi-relationship is quite weird, chaste to the point that it starts to feel like Dwight is leading her on, and yet... when the Commander is too hung up on his lost wife to sleep with this younger woman, Moira understands. When he seeks a pogo stick to give to his (long-dead) daughter as a Christmas present, Moira has her old one from childhood refurbished and gifts it to him. She's a subtle contrast to Mary, who – despite being cast as a model 1950s housewife – is actually very selfish in her traumatised, completely forgiveable way. Moira, under the same circumstances, is quite stunningly generous. Fallen woman? Not in your life!

The book's final scene follows Moira as she farewells Dwight from the Williamstown docks, then jumps in her father's Customline and races the Scorpion down through, "Laverton with its big aerodrome, Werribee with its experimental farm … [then] passed the grammar school away on the left and came to shabby, industrial Corio, and so to Geelong, dominated by the cathedral." From there, she roars through Barwon Heads and doesn't stop until she pulls up beside the Point Lonsdale lighthouse. Her reward is one final glimpse of the Scorpion – just a grey shape eight kilometres away – knowing Dwight would be there, standing proud atop the sail. Then she recites the Lord's prayer, takes her pills and washes them down with a last hit of brandy, and because she was our last POV character, that's the last thing we ever know from this story. The last humans in the last city on Earth have been snuffed out.

Yes, it's a grim read. I saw one commenter who said they took it to read in their downtime in Afghanistan, and couldn't finish it because it was more depressing than the war. It's been adapted for film twice, once in 1959 (which was allegedly so bad it hastened the author into an early grave), and once in 2000, which suffers mainly from being low-budget made-for-TV slop. I can imagine another reboot being done by – pick a name out of a hat – Denis Villeneuve, master of the long, beautiful static shot that would really make Melbourne look haunting. I can imagine him shooting that last scene to resemble the Bridge of Death sequence from Episode 1 of Chernobyl, the same ominous slow-motion as the particles descend and swirl, the same whuum-whuum leitmotif signalling that radioactive Death has finally come. It'd be a hell of a way for the human experiment to end.

Truth Hurts
The superpowers never stockpiled cobalt bombs, but don't take too much comfort from that. It wasn't out of any ethical concern, it was simply because they don't make very effective weapons. "Dirty bombs" are just too unreliable for serious militaries, leaving them the preserve of terrorists and anyone else who doesn't have to worry about collateral damage. You'd never get the kind of even radiation coverage Shute imagined, especially not the kind that would produce the frequent "beautiful sunny day/empty streets" paradox that makes On The Beach so haunting. But the phrase "nuclear winter" wasn't due to enter the lexicon until 1983, decades after Shute's own final extinction, so he wasn't to know radiation alone wasn't the problem. On The Beach is an artefact of its time, a specific and applied case of technophobia captured and preserved like a butterfly under glass. But despite what Pieper said, it's not a nihilist text, not even slightly. Shute is far too good at making us feel really sad about everything that's happening for the reader to embrace it as a grand return to Nirvana. He just had the balls to point out that, if the end really was nigh, most people would carry on doing what they were already doing anyway. And that, apparently, is just too confronting for most of us to bear.

Taking a Third Option: 1957 Chrysler Royal AP1

The rise of Chrysler Australia in many ways parallels that of Holden. Both companies began as Adelaide coachbuilders in the 19th Century, and both made the shift to motor vehicles begrudgingly, under the influence of the founders' offspring. But where Holden seemed to live a charmed life, only ever going from strength to strength, Chrysler spent its entire life parked in Struggle Street. 

Protestant Work Ethic
As GM-H began with James Alexander Holden, so Chrysler Australia began with a man: Tobias John Martin Richards. Born in Montacute, South Australia in 1850, he learned his trade as a coachbuilder and blacksmith working for Ludwig Maraun of Pirie Street, Adelaide – only a block over from the Grenfell Street premises of Holden & Frost. By 1885, Richards had the means to strike out on his own, founding T.J. Richards Ltd in what was then West Mitcham, south of Adelaide. Richards became a respected name in the business, responsible for a number of award-winning buggies and coaches – most notably his plush "King of the Road" sulky. The business did well, and in 1900 T.J. Richards expanded to a new half-acre premises on the west side of Hindmarsh Square. In 1907 the workshop was expanded to two storeys, and the old West Mitcham shop was wound up as no longer necessary. By the time Richards retired in 1911, the business was valued at £25,000 (nearly $4.3 million in 2024). 

Where it all began: the original workshop at Mitcham.

During this time, Richards' dearly-beloved, Matilda, had borne him nine children. Six of their offspring were sons, of whom four eventually went into their father's business in some capacity or another. Eldest son Herbert had a strained relationship with the old man, so he left to strike out on a motor business venture of his own. That left the company to his second and third sons, Henry and Claude respectively, which was renamed T.J. Richards & Sons in their honour. After Henry tragically died in a motorcycle accident in May 1915, Claude became the sole company head.

Like their cross-town rivals at Holden & Frost, T.J. Richards & Sons gravitated across to motor vehicles only slowly, producing their first experimental car body in 1905. Tobias refused to consider that the horse might ever be supplanted and never owned a car himself, so it was largely the enthusiasm of Claude that drove their investigation into this new industry. T.J. Richards & Sons made their last horse-drawn vehicle in 1915.

The Keswick plant. (Source: State Library of SA)

After the Great War, T.J. Richards & Sons feasted on the bonanza of imported chassis in need of bodies, constructing them for brands as diverse as Austin, Citroën, Fiat, Morris, Studebaker, Dodge Brothers and Hudson. In February 1920, the company bought a three-acre site at the northern corner of Bay Road (soon to be Anzac Highway) and Leader Street, for £1,900 ($168,000). Although technically located in Forestville, it became known as the Keswick plant because it lay just south of the Keswick Army Barracks (now the Army Museum of South Australia). By April 1925, the Keswick plant had been extended along Leader Street to cover nearly seven acres. By mid-1926, the company employed 425 people building more than 5,000 bodies a year on simple production lines, resulting in annual turnover of some £200,000 (more than $20 million). By 1928, Richards was the second-largest body-builder in Australia, behind only (of course) Holden's Motor Body Builders Ltd. Between them, Richards and Holden's produced about 80 percent of Australia's car, truck and tram bodies in those days.

Walt
Around the same time, former Buick manager Walter P. Chrysler took over the ailing Maxwell Motor Company in the United States and reformed it into his shiny new Chrysler Corporation. Maxwell had been hit hard by the post-WWI recession and found themselves deeply in debt, with spiralling build quality issues killing all demand for their cars. Having performed corporate resuscitations like this before (most notably with Willys-Overland), Walter Chrysler took on the challenge and moved his headquarters to their Highland Park office in Detroit, Michigan. Chrysler soon absorbed the Dodge Brothers Company and, following the tenets of Sloanism, founded the Plymouth and DeSoto brands in 1928. If you wore overalls and worked for a wage, you bought a Plymouth; if you wore a button-up shirt and worked for a salary, you bought a Dodge or DeSoto. And if you wore a full suit and didn't need to work at all, only then could you contemplate a luxurious Chrysler or Imperial.

Soon Chrysler was looking to expand overseas, and naturally his eye was drawn to Australia. In January 1930, T.J Richards & Sons signed a contract with Chrysler for the manufacture of 5,000 Dodge and DeSoto bodies. The deal was worth a colossal £500,000 (over $52 million in 2024), so to fulfil it Richards bought a new 5.7-acre site on the northern side of Scotland Road, just to the west of Adelaide in Mile End South. Ironically, this plant had lately been the home of South Australia's Ford distributors, Duncan & Fraser Ltd, who'd just been (quite deliberately) driven out of business by Ford Australia. The site, running between Railway Terrace and the Holdfast Bay railway line, cost £17,500 ($1.8 million) and opened in early 1931.

The distinctive "Chrysler Dodge Plymouth DeSoto" sign was a local landmark for decades.

Unfortunately, by the time the plant opened Australia was in the heart of the Great Depression, and as Chrysler were forced to drastically wind back production, so imports of chassis into Australia dried up. For the financial year 1931-'32, T.J. Richards posted losses of more than £31,000 ($3.6 million), and their employee payroll dropped to just 98 workers, all at Keswick. Thankfully, August 1932 saw them land a £100,000 ($12.3 million) contract to manufacture a thousand bodies for the Standard company of Britain, pulling the company back from the brink. By mid-1934, they were firmly on the rebound, back to employing around 1,400 workers – 900 at Keswick, which concentrated on metal stamping and fabrication, and 500 at Mile End South, which was dedicated to assembly. By 1935, Richards was producing 11,000 bodies per year – forty a day – and they were able to pay shareholders their first dividend since 1930. Profits for the decade peaked at £45,106 (just over $5.2 million) for the financial year 1936-'37.

It was at this point the dealers came knocking. In December 1936, the eighteen largest Chrysler distributors in Australia had decided to unionise merge to increase their bargaining power with Highland Park. The resulting company became Chrysler Dodge Distributors (Australia) Ltd, and they quickly began throwing their weight around. With Ford now consolidated in Geelong and Holden's Motor Body Builders Ltd recently absorbed into GM, they needed to move quickly to secure their supply chain. Their gaze naturally turned to the largest supplier of Chrysler bodies in the country, T.J. Richards & Sons, in which they bought a controlling interest. Reassuring any jittery workers that their jobs would remain secure, CDD allowed Richards to renew or pursue fresh contracts with rival brands like Packard, Standard, Studebaker and Willys-Overland, and in mid-1938 they moved their headquarters from Melbourne to Adelaide.

With these windfalls, T.J. Richards & Sons was able to upgrade both Keswick and Mile End South, with all paint shop and upholstering duties transferred to the latter. By May 1938, Richards employed 3,280 workers and had a turnover close to £2 million ($227 million) – a ten-fold increase on 1930. That same year they also beat Holden to the punch when they produced Australia's – and indeed one of the world's – first all-steel car bodies. Developed under the influence of Maurice Richards, grandson of Tobias, the "Safe-T-Steel" body consisted of a single-piece steel roof, one-piece steel body panels and doors, and a steel floor, all welded together into a single unit. From 1937, all Richards-made Chryslers were fabricated in steel.

Then of course war returned, and T.J. Richards & Sons – like Holden and Ford before them – were subsumed into the Department of Munitions, producing land mine casings, ammunition boxes, cable drums and mountings for 2-pounder anti-tank guns. In September 1941, the company renamed itself Richards Industries Ltd, feeling it was more in-keeping with their expanded portfolio, and after 1942 they focused almost exclusively on aircraft panels, such as for the Bristol Beaufort, Avro Lancaster bomber and CAC Wirraway trainer.

Chrysler Australia Ltd
Once peace returned, Richards Industries wasted no time reverting back to motor vehicles, expanding the Mile End South facility again and, in September 1949, buying the wartime aircraft factory for £37,175 ($2.6 million). Although progress was slowed by post-war resource shortages, by mid-1946 Richards was already producing more than 500 bodies per week, and employing more than 2,500 workers (up from a wartime minimum of 2,000).

In October 1947 the inevitable finally happened, as CDD finally acquired one-hundred percent of Richards Industries Ltd – securing the company's future, but also ending the family's association with the business their ancestor had founded. Association with other marques was wound up as they focused on Chrysler products. By 1950, Mile End South was approaching its maximum extent of nine acres, and assembly of an almost-complete vehicle from sub-assembled panels took just thirteen minutes. Their net profit for 1949-'50 was £156,330 (more than $10 million) – almost double that of two years earlier – while gross turnover was £4.75 million ($309 million), more than twenty times what they'd seen before the war.

Numbers like that attracted attention, and at long last the Chrysler Corporation itself began to take notice. As early as 1949 there were rumours the U.S. giant was looking to assume full control of CDD, but the consortium rejected an initial £700,000 ($45.5 million) takeover offer in November 1950. Undeterred, in June 1951, Chrysler finally succeeded in buying 85 percent of CDD's ordinary shares and thereby gained a controlling interest in the company, which they promptly renamed to reflect its new status. Chrysler Australia Ltd was in business.

They hit the ground running. October 1951 saw the new bosses embark on a £1 million ($55 million) modernisation and expansion programme, including reorganising Mile End South in accordance with American mass-production techniques. A range of minor parts (such as steering boxes) were made at the Perry Engineering foundry and stamping plants, adjacent to Mile End South. They brought in the dies and tooling to begin stamping panels for the latest 1953 Plymouth, which was then sold as the Plymouth Cranbrook, Dodge Kingsway and DeSoto Diplomat – same cars underneath, just with different grilles and badging. It was a cynical attempt to appeal to more affluent buyers, but we've already established that the Kingsway cost £1,787, so affluent buyers were likely to be the only kind...

Rather gorgeous promotional image of the Diplomat. "1956" plate on 1953 curves unnecessary to know this is a local image, just check the hills behind them. This could only be Australia.

The engine was Chrysler's side-valve "PowerFlow" inline six, a lump that hadn't meaningfully changed since the 1930s (nor would it before it was replaced in the early 1960s). This engine came as a crate unit from Chrysler's U.K. plant in Kew, west London, so although not local content it was at least being sourced within the Commonwealth, helping keep costs manageable. Despite a 230ci displacement, it could offer only 22 kW more than Holden's 132ci Grey, a problem when the car's full chassis meant a kerb weight of 1,512kg.

Few were head over heels for a Cranbrook, and fewer still even bought a Diplomat, but the Chrysler trinity nevertheless found their groove as tough rural cruisers that could handle rough roads without complaint and tolerate dodgy local petrol. In an Australia starved for new cars they actually sold pretty well, with 4,382 of them leaving the plants between 1951 and 1953. By 1954 the reorganisation of the assembly line was complete, a new paint shop and finishing line were in operation, and net profits rose to £858,388 ($38 million). Mid-1955 saw the company invest another £275,000 ($12 million) in a new plant at Mile End South, while another £500,000 went into a spare parts division at Keswick. Chrysler Australia now employed 4,300 workers, many of them newly-arrived immigrants.

Not strictly relevant, but I couldn't resist including this image (dated 17 Oct 1954) of a Chrysler Plymouth hire car that's had a crash with a tram on Pitt Street, Sydney. The relationship between Chrysler Australia and the hire car industry started early. (Source: SMH Archive via Facebook)

But despite this promising start to the decade, the outlook turned bleak after 1955. By the mid-1950s, Chrysler's offerings were being out-styled by the Chevrolet Bel Air, Ford Customline and, yes, the new FE Holden. The Cranbrook's shape – rounded, upright, rather stodgy – was rapidly going out of fashion as wide, flat and low-slung became the name of the game. The twin flat windscreens, although wonderfully cheap to make, gave it away as a design from the 1940s, with engine and suspension technology to match. Having started with a 10 percent market share in 1950, Chrysler gradually slipped to 4.8 percent by 1956. At this time, Holden's market share was climbing towards 50 percent, Ford enjoyed 15 percent, and even BMC Australia – recently formed from the merger of Austin and Morris – were managing about the same. Something had to be done.

What they really needed was one of the new designs being released by their parent company in the U.S. – something like the rather handsome 1955 Chrysler 300, which was making waves in early NASCAR. But this was out of the question: Highland Park was in fact in the process of paying back an enormous $250 million loan from Prudential Insurance (more than $3 billion in today's USD), so they were in no position to fund a whole new range for Australia. It was the familiar Catch-22 of the car industry, needing a new model to generate sales, but needing more sales to justify investment in the new model. Backed into a corner, Chrysler Australia's only option was to repackage what they already had, and just pray that the market fell for it. This was the line of thinking that led Chrysler to develop their first uniquely Australian model.

The Royal Treatment
The challenge confronting Chrysler Australia's tiny team of stylists and engineers was simple: how to cobble together a vehicle that looked new and fresh enough to revamp interest, when they weren't able to change any of the underlying tooling?

Through 1955, a small team of Australian and American designers tackled this very problem, looking for ways of adapting U.S. designer Virgil Exner's new "Forward Look" styling cues – long bonnets, low rooflines and huge fins – to a shape from the 1940s. The roof and doors of the '53 sedan were kept, but onto the front end they grafted the headlight surrounds, bonnet and grille of the upcoming U.S.-market '57 Plymouth. 

Promo image for the '57 Plymouth. That Chrysler Corp made some of the most ornate cars of their day is brought home when you remember this was meant to be the entry-level brand.

The front and rear guards were borrowed from the '56 Plymouth, while the rear quarter panels were redesigned with dramatic full-length fins. The front windscreen remained flat, but it became a single large piece instead of split like that on the old Cranbrook. They did add a properly Fifties wrap-around windscreen (creating development problems for Pilkington Glass, the Australian suppliers who struggled to get the right curved shape...) but then they put it at the wrong end, using it at the rear of the glasshouse instead of the front where it belonged! But considering the budget they had to work with, and the fact that Chrysler Australia didn't yet have a formal styling department, it was all kind of impressive.

By early 1956, seven disguised prototypes were busy racking up the miles on the back roads of South Australia, their identity hidden by the simple expedient of tying down tarps front and rear. Not even Holden had their own proving grounds yet, so open-road testing was still the industry standard. It might've been crude, but the prototypes logged over 100,000 miles with only minimal changes required before production could begin. But not everything went so smoothly.

Amazing how the simple device of removing the hub caps to expose the pressed-steel wheels underneath makes any car look like a junker on its way to the panel-beater.

Halfway through 1956, body engineer Doug Rohrsheim was busy attending meetings with Diecast Ltd to finalise supply of the various pieces of brightwork needed for the upcoming cars. The plan had been to carry through the Plymouth Belvedere, Dodge Kingsway and DeSoto Diplomat in order to supply their three dealer franchises. They were to be differentiated by separate badges, bonnet ornaments, grilles and wheel arches, with the Dodge earning a body-coloured split grille divider in the shorter front clip. The original designations for the three models had been AD1 for the Dodge, AS1 for the DeSoto and AP1 for the Plymouth.

At the last minute, however, chief engineer Roy Rainsford cancelled the Dodge and DeSoto versions, voiding most of the work Rohrsheim had just done. The Plymouth was to be the only game in town, and despite its lowly appointments, it would be sold as a Chrysler. It was at this point that it was finally given the "Royal" nameplate, resurrecting a name that had gone extinct in the U.S. a few years earlier. Instead of Australian Plymouth, the AP1 designation was retroactively changed to stand for "Australian Production": hence, the Chrysler Royal AP1.

Launch day: less a major industry media event and more a small-town annual show.

"Australia's Car of Distinction" was launched with full fanfare in February 1957, touted as, "setting the styling trends" with its interpretation of Exner's Forward Look styling philosophy. Chrysler boasted of its full-time power steering and "Safety-Sure" powered brakes, both innovations in the Australian market. Four colour combinations were offered – green, grey, blue and tan, each over "Moonlight" accents, combined into an elegant spear that thrust toward the front end. You'd be forgiven for thinking it was all looking rather good.

Instead, it immediately sank without a trace. People seemed to realise that the Royal wasn't quite the real thing, the car you bought when you couldn't afford a Chevrolet or Customline. The face was overwhelmed by that gargantuan radiator grille, which the single headlights and massive bumper overriders struggled to balance out. The wrap-around rear windscreen failed to distract from the high roof and carryover doors, and the tailfins were just silly, towering above the old, rounded boot lid. The hemispherical hub caps were simply from a bygone era. In short, the styling seemed to highlight the car's 1953 origins, not hide them, attempting to replicate American excess without understanding the substance beneath.

What the '57 Plymouth grille became when applied to the narrower Cranbrook body: a tad overpowering.

Things weren't much better on the engine front. Initially there were two of them to choose from: the existing 230ci side-valver, which gave 86 kW and was paired with a 3-on-the-tree manual (with automatic overdrive); or the bigger 250ci with 87 kW, sourced from Chrysler's Windsor plant in Canada (in both cases, assembly was now handled locally). In either spec, these ageing designs just didn't have the mumbo to compete with GM's more modern overhead-valve sixes, let alone Ford's new Y-block V8. 

Side-valve engines had a time and place, but by the late 1950s that wasn't beneath the bonnet of a prestige car.

Even so, the 250 was worth the extra money, as it came paired with Chrysler's excellent "PowerFlite" 2-speed automatic gearbox. In most markets the PowerFlite had already been superseded by the 3-speed TorqueFlite, but that just meant the tooling was available to send to Australia. Upon its U.S. launch, Chrysler had bragged the PowerFlite had 110 fewer parts and weighed 45kg less than an unnamed rival (almost certainly GM's Hydra-Matic), and would eventually prove tough enough to stand up to anything, including a Hemi V8. Early versions had been operated by a small selector lever on the dash, but since 1956 it had came with quirky push-button controls instead – you simply pressed "D" for drive, "N" for neutral, "R" for reverse, or "L" to lock it in the lower gear, such as when towing or climbing a hill (the parking brake was operated by a separate lever, so there was no button labelled "P"). It was such a simple, reliable system that – the ultimate flattery – the Soviets ripped it off and created their own version for their ZIL limousines!

The more I think about it, the less silly this system seems. Why take up cabin space for controls that merely resemble their manual counterparts?

Good as it was, the PowerFlite wasn't enough to sell the Royal all on its own. You splashed out on an American car because you wanted power, good looks and world-class build quality (believe it or not, "close enough for government work" originally meant higher standards). The latter points were right out out (build quality would remain a bugbear of the local industry until the end), but Chrysler remedied the power problem late in 1957, when their new 313ci "Fury" V8 joined the options list. The Canadians had taken Chrysler's new 318ci "A" engine and under-bored it to 313ci (so they could re-use existing tooling), so it came with a claimed 164 kW at 4,000rpm (plus 440 Nm of torque at 2,800rpm, though on Australian fuel both figures dropped significantly). This finally gave the car enough urge to match its fins: the top speed rose to 152km/h, and 0-100 could be achieved in 17.4 seconds (I've seen 13.5 seconds quoted in some places but that seems optimistic; ditto the "152mph" top speed!). Even so, it was still compromised: the V8 was so big installing it required butter and a shoehorn, and it was an oldschool V8 with heavy castings that exacerbated the Royal's front weight bias, placing extra strain on the feeble front brakes and soft suspension. Fuel consumption largely depended on how it was driven, but with a light foot it could get as good as 15 litres per 100km (compared to 13 or so for the manual six).

It also added a premium to the Royal's asking price, with one road test reporting the car they'd been allocated cost £2,179 ($81,000), including tax and the mandatory PowerFlite gearbox. The engine was ordered on fewer than 500 cars in its first year, but that proved to be a function of how late in the year it arrived; by the end of production, it was powering almost half of all Royals.

So the Chrysler Royal wasn't a great car, but here's the thing: there wasn't much actually wrong with it, either. Its Plymouth/Dodge/DeSoto predecessors had earned their place by being tough, simple and easy to repair, and all those things were still true of the Royal (mostly because it was still the same car underneath). Even if the cabin was a bit bare, the vinyl seats were comfy, the push-button auto was unbreakable, and parking was aided by the huge tailfins, which let you see exactly where the rear corners were. Farmers especially related to its rugged full chassis and uncomplicated design, and its only mechanical drawback – sheer size – was no bad thing in their eyes. The six-cylinder engines might not have been exciting, but they never gave you any trouble either, and most buyers weren't looking for a performance car anyway. That said, the V8 was fearsome for its time: former owners remember the many gutless British trucks running between Sydney and Melbourne in those days, which could add hours – literally – to a road trip if you got stuck behind them crawling up the hills. The brisk acceleration of the V8 had real uses back then.

Outside a handful of loyal private buyers, however, the Royal really only found its niche in government, taxi and hire car fleets. Hire companies particularly appreciated its lack of cutting-edge technology – when you were only running a vehicle for a profit, every penny spent on maintenance was another betrayal, and the Royal seemed to thrive on neglect. Thanks to their full chassis, Royals soon found themselves modified into ambulances, and they were also popular with funeral service directors as the basis for hearse conversions. And of course, the V8 made the Royal immediately popular as a highway patrol car for the South Australian police...

The original AP1 ambulance featured a fibreglass cabin extension developed by Commonwealth Engineering, or Comeng. (Source: Carswp)

Verdict?
So, was the Chrysler Royal a secret masterpiece, only let down by dodgy styling? No, not really. It was big, it was cumbersome, and even the V8 models were a tad gutless (though they frequently made the Royal the one-eyed man in the land of the blind – it was 1957, after all). But did it deserve a more enthusiastic reception than the tumbleweeds it actually got? I think the case could be made. Today, rarity alone makes them collectible, as only 4,748 AP1s were ever built, and even fewer were salted away to preserve them. The same kitschy looks that sank the Royal as a new car are now celebrated as quirky and "period".

But in its primary mission – returning Chrysler Australia to profitability – the Royal can only be judged a failure. Despite their best efforts, Chrysler's sales continued to slide, and the company would post huge financial losses for the next few years. The future looked bleak, but Chrysler Australia was only down, not out: after all they'd already been through, they were never going to give up that easily.