1935-1948: Seeding the Plants

As the Great Depression ground on, Ford Australia's sales slowed, but never quite halted. Even in the midst of the harshest economic downturn on record, there were businesses and government departments in need of vehicles, and Ford was in prime position to supply them. As a result, the 1930s were a time of slow but steady expansion.

You see, very quickly the young Ford Australia had realised manufacturing entire cars in Geelong and then shipping them all over the country wasn't going to keep up with demand. The way forward was to go with a more basic assembly process in Geelong, with the half-finished cars dispatched to the relevant state capitals by rail or cargo ship, to be finished off in satellite assembly plants. Within 18 months, the first round of these satellite plants had begun to open.

Eagle Farm Assembly Plant (Brisbane, Qld)

Aerial shot of Eagle Farm from 1967 (Source: Flickr)

Built on land belonging to the Yuggera nation, this factory was located at 31 Schneider Road, Eagle Farm, an industrial suburb just to the north-east of Brisbane CBD. The area was allegedly named Eagle Farm after eagles were seen hanging around farmland established by the original Moreton Bay penal colony (it was not a clever name). Since the plant opened in 1926, its proximity to what would become Brisbane Airport was probably just a coincidence, as nothing heavier than mail was travelling by air in those days. Closed down in 1998, the building was finally demolished some time shortly before the pandemic, by which time it was apparently in a very sad state.

Largs Bay Assembly Plant (Adelaide, SA)

Largs Bay c.1936 (Source: Motor History SA)

Also opened in 1926, built (as previously established) on the land of the Kaurna people, on the corner of Victoria Road and Jetty Road, Largs Bay. At the time the area was an industrial suburb, and its position on the Lefevre Peninsula gave handy access to Adelaide's port facilities, and apparently that was enough for the Ford Motor Company. This building has survived, and according to Google Maps is currently home to the Rapid Haulage trucking company.

Fremantle Assembly Plant (North Fremantle, WA)

Fremantle Assembly c.1929 (Source: Freotopia)

Like its compatriots, the five-acre Fremantle site (on Wajuk land) was chosen for its access to port facilities and railways. Opened in 1929, on the corner of the Stirling Highway and Coventry Parade, chassis were initially dispatched from Geelong by sea, where they were mated to bodies reportedly shipped from Canada. Happily, when Ford closed the site in 1987, it was taken over by the Matilda Bay Brewing Company, who used it as a brewery until 2020 brought with it the pandemic. At this point, the overlords at Fosters decided to shift all brewing to the eastern states and list the site as "permanently closed". With residential development encroaching (cutely called "The Assembly"), it's possible the former Ford plant might once again be in danger.

Anyway, none of these sites were as interesting and difficult to find as the oldest one, the NSW plant in Sydney...

Sandown (?) Assembly (Sydney, NSW)

No image for this one. You're about to find out why.

This ended up being quite a rabbit hole, so indulge me for a moment and let me take you through the process. It started with one intriguing line on Strathfield Heritage:

...[Ford Australia's] first assembly plant in NSW was established at Sandown...¹

Huh? A Sandown in Sydney? Now obviously, the prevalence of the other Sandown would've made this tricky to suss out even if Google still worked these days, and the fact that the above line has been copypasted across various "I remember when..." Facebook pages made it even tougher. Worse, when your humble author made his big break to get out and get away, he went to Melbourne, not Sydney, so his knowledge of the NSW capital is quite limited. Thankfully, however, he did have parents and co-workers he could ask, and between them we eventually managed to sort it out.

It was a co-worker (who'd been a Sydney beach bum in earlier times) who told me that yes, there was a Sandown in Sydney, actually – and it was a horse racing track. I groaned: That would not make it easier to find. But she insisted she'd been there, she'd taken the train to a day at the races once and, bringing up Google Maps on my phone, she identified an area roughly around Parramatta and Granville as the location. Zooming in, the pixels slowly cleared to reveal a certain Rosehill Gardens Racecourse.²

My eyes narrowed. Okay, so she wasn't making it up: Maybe the place had taken a rebranding since she was last there? But no, it emerged the "Rosehill" name dates all the way back to colonisation, when Arthur Phillip named the whole area Rose Hill, after his mate and former British treasurer, George Rose. No rebranding then, but searching for "Sandown" in conjunction with "Rosehill" quickly netted the truth: There was actually a Sandown Line, which in its final years was used exclusively to bring punters in big hats to Rosehill to enjoy a day of champagne and chicken on the green. Special trains would be run and everyone would disembark at the Sandown platform, which was no doubt where my friend had detrained and started all the confusion. Before that it was a commuter line, with platform names highlighting the industrial nature of the area – James Hardie, Goodyear's and Cream of Tartar. Which is where it gets interesting, because before that, it was a freight line serving said industries.

I won't go into the history of the line itself – I'm already into military history and classic cars, I do NOT have time to get into trains as well – but I did look into it on YouTube, and there are a handful of videos riding the line in the mid-1980s, shortly before it was all closed down. With all that context in my back pocket, eventually I found Dictionary Of Sydney's entry on the suburb of Camellia, which finally spelled it out:

In 1925 the Ford Motor Company purchased a very large area and commenced construction of a huge works in Camellia, but made little use of it because of the depressed financial period. In 1935 it constructed a new assembly plant on Parramatta Road, located with a rail link to the Homebush Abattoir Line. It then sold all of its land to the Shell Oil Company.

So Ford's original Sydney assembly plant operated on a go-slow for about a decade, before the land was sold to Shell and, presumably, became part of the Shell oil refinery. Mystery solved? Not entirely. I still need a photo of the place, and its official name, and some reminiscences of its time in operation would be nice, so if any readers can please help out the comment box is below. But in the end I suppose it doesn't really matter, because the really historic Ford plant was the one built about ten minutes down the road.

Homebush Assembly Plant (Sydney, NSW)

Homebush aerial view, exact year unknown but clearly pretty early given the rest of the suburb is yet to be built. (Source: I Grew Up In Mortdale 2223)

The one everyone remembers, built on Wangal land at the new address of 350-374 Parramatta Road, Homebush. The big question is why Ford abandoned the Camellia site when it was not even a decade into its life and, apparently, had hardly even been used? There are a handful of clues, though. For one, it would've been part of the original Ford strategy of merely touching up cars that had already been completed in Geelong, which by 1935 was long abandoned. For another – and this is only a guess, but it ties into the above – one of my sources mentioned Homebush was an ex-freezing works, which is clearly wrong as Homebush was brand-new, built from scratch. So what if they simply got it mixed up, and it was actually the Camellia site that was the ex-freezing works? That would make more sense, and indeed, Parramatta History & Heritage mentions this intriguing tidbit:

In 1900, the Austral Meat Company Ltd. commenced construction of its plant fronting the Duck River for the production of chilled and frozen meat for export. Operations on the site commenced in December 1900 and this area later became the site of the crude oil refinery.

So... is it possible that in between being a meat works and an oil refinery, the site was also a Ford assembly plant? That would certainly explain why it needed replacing so soon – whatever size it happened to be, it was never going to be suitable for the kind of manufacturing Ford had in mind once demand started picking up.

Facing the Future
You might have noticed the externals of all these factories look pretty much the same, which is to say, they all look like Norlane. Your eyes are not deceiving you: Fremantle, Eagle Farm and Homebush³ are three of about twenty Ford plants built around the world that were all pretty much identical. Some say it happened that way because Henry Ford had such a passion for rationalisation he wanted all Ford factories everywhere to share a common layout and operate exactly the same way. Others whisper he was just too tight to pay an architect for more than one set of plans. This is probably the origin of the myth that Norlane (and later Broadmeadows) was mistakenly built with a roof rated for Michigan snows, because the bosses in Detroit never realised it wouldn't be necessary in our warmer climate. It's not necessarily true that they'd assumed Geelong got as much snowfall as the Canadian border, it's just that for economy's sake they built the same factory over and over again. If that factory had a stronger roof than strictly necessary, well, no harm done. We’ll be kind and just say all these plants share a common design language, and note that they had other points of commonality as well, such as an eye for rail and sea links.

The first car to leave the new Homebush plant was a '36 V8, and although the precise number of cars Ford built that year is hard to find, roughly 200 soft-top Roadsters are attested. Which if nothing else illustrates that economic recessions really are the concern of the middle classes: The poor lose nothing because they have nothing, while the One Percent are too busy living the Entrapment Principle to really notice them.⁴

Believe it or not, you could also get the rag top on a ute. (Source: Classic Car Catalogue)

By 1937, strong sales prompted Ford to invest another £150,000 (nearly $17 million) on buildings and machinery, including the larger presses required to produce a one-piece roof. That this was following hot on the heels of Holden's Sloper is not a coincidence: In 1939, the Sloper bodystyle was made available on the Standard and Deluxe V8s, with Ford calling it the Tudor. Priced at £335 (nearly $36,000 in 2023) for the Standard and £350 ($37,500) for the Deluxe, the Tudor replaced the imported Club Coupe. Sadly, production figures don't seem to be available.

Things should have ticked upward further with the coming of the 1941 model year, but by then of course, the war had come. Ford spent World War II in much the same fashion as Holden, subsumed into the Department of Munitions to produce matériel for the Commonwealth. This resulted, in 1941, in another £100,000 ($9.8 million) extension to Norlane in the interest of meeting its quota of wartime armaments. With a workforce mostly comprised of women, Geelong manufactured landing barges (455 of them), military vehicles and ammunition, while Eagle Farm (appropriately) was responsible for some 65,000 aircraft drop tanks.

Dingo armoured cars under construction in Geelong. A uniquely Australian design, only 245 of them were built before the line was shut down in 1943, due to their poor performance in combat. After that they were restricted to training units. (Source: Cars Guide)

When peace eventually settled over the ashes of Hiroshima and Tokyo, Ford was arguably in an even better position than Holden (in the short term, at least). Where Holden had potential, Ford was able to rotate back to civilian production almost immediately, thanks to the 1941-model Ford still being current. The deprivations of war meant the only difference between a '41 Ford and its '46 successor was the styling, and this would remain true all the way until the storied model year of 1948. At which point – at long last – it will be time to talk about "Gelignite" Jack Murray.

¹ Some other sources said Lidcombe instead.

² My apologies to any trotter fans currently slapping their foreheads that I needed something this obvious explained, but I've never much been into horse racing.

³ Once source also mentioned another assembly, supposedly built in a former brewery in Hobart, but I have yet to find any evidence like a photograph or, for that matter, a second mention somewhere.

⁴ For those who aren't walking repositories of late-nineties cinephilia, in a dispute over his cut of the upcoming heist, Sean Connery asks Catherine Zeta Jones, "What can you do with sheven billion dollarsh you can't do with four?" I feel like this question should be put to every billionaire every time they're about to make a decision.

1928-1934: From A to B

Aggressive restructuring was only half the problem hitting Australia's Ford dealers in the mid-1920s. The real issue was much more basic, and was punishing Ford in every market simultaneously – the Model T simply wasn't the hot-ticket item anymore.

Sales brochure image of the '32 cabriolet. Actually from Ford of Britain, but it was too good an image not to use. (Source: Classic Car Catalogue)

Henry's Lady
Back in the U.S., the author of all Ford's pain was our old friend, Alfred P. Sloan, head of General Motors. He was one of the first industry leaders to realise there was a kind of "saturation point" looming. Henry Ford might've cooked up the perfect package for early adopters, but what would happen once everybody who wanted a car already had one, and any further sales could only be had by tempting existing customers back to the market? Why should anyone who'd owned a Model T for perhaps ten years, Sloan reasoned, be happy to trade it in for a replacement that was virtually identical in every respect? No, to sell new cars to people who already had one, you had to redefine "new" as "better". It was this approach he would go on to outline in his famous 1940 Product Policy, summed up by the immortal phrase, "A car for every purse and purpose."

We want to make you dissatisfied with your current car so you will buy a new one – you who can afford it … And you who can afford it perform – probably unconsciously – a very important economic service. You pass on to the used-car market your old car at a value in transportation with which no new car could possibly compete.

To this end, in 1927 Sloan appointed Harley Earl head of a new "Art & Color" division – what we'd now call the styling department – then reshuffled the GM company hierarchy in line with his new philosophy, inventing the Pontiac brand out of whole cloth to be a next step up from Chevrolet.

The plan was to keep customers moving up the ladder to ever more expensive and prestigious brands. In theory, a young blue-collar factory worker would start off buying an entry-level Chevrolet, but if they worked hard and one day got promoted, they'd take some of that extra pay and upgrade to a new Pontiac. In a few more years, they might trade up to a middle-aged person's car, like an Oldsmobile or Buick. It would keep going like this until the buyer was greying at the temples and their years of experience made them a quality control officer at the factory (and a respected figure in the union), by which point they should be tooling around in a big, luxury Cadillac. Today this strategy is unsurprisingly called Sloanism, and Henry Ford was so unprepared for it that his company would still be trying to respond on the notorious "E Day", 4 September 1957. The quarter-billion dollar debacle of the Edsel would come about largely because Ford was still grasping around for a way out of grooming customers for GM.

1928 Model A Phaeton, built in Geelong by Ford Australia. This one was actually for sale at the time the image was posted; I wonder what it went for? (Source: Facebook)

With Model T sales at last in sharp decline, in 1926 Henry Ford and his son Edsel went back to the drawing board and, in great secrecy, got busy designing "the New Car". It featured an upgraded 3.3-litre engine capable of 40bhp (30 kW, or double the Model T's output), and three gears instead of two, meaning it could reach speeds in excess of 100km/h. It was also the first Ford to use what we now consider "standard" driver controls, as pioneered by the 1916 Cadillac Type 53 and popularised by the Austin 7 of 1923.

As a sign Ford really was starting over, Henry rebooted his designation system and dubbed his new creation the Model A, later more affectionately known as Henry's Lady . It was unveiled to the U.S. public on 2 December 1927, and by the end of that week, an astonishing one in every four Americans had viewed the display. Initially it was priced at only $500 ($9,200 in 2024 USD), so by February 1929 a million of them had been sold – a figure that became 2 million by July that same year. By March 1930, 3 million had left the factories, and by the time production shut down in March 1932, the build total had capped out at a respectable 4.8 million.

Even so, by Ford's standards the car was something of a flop. Under Sloan's leadership, General Motors had offered early Model T buyers something they'd never had before: A choice. For only a little more money than a new Model A, customers could upgrade to the latest-model Chevrolet instead – or, if they preferred, they could get a second-hand Chevy for the same price as the Ford, or even at a slight discount. As a result, where Ford managed 1.5 million sales in 1929, GM managed 1.7 million with their top three brands alone. The Ford Motor Company was wrongfooted badly, and Henry's years of greatness were already behind him, leaving him to indulge in weird projects like Fordlandia, printing hundreds of copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to distribute to other industry leaders, and accepting an award from Nazi officials who wished to thank him for supporting the Reich.¹

One of Ford Australia's ads for the Model A, c. 1928 (Source: Reddit)

It took another five months for the Model A to reach Australia, showing up in all the capital cities on 15 May 1928. Within four days, more than 300,000 people had visited the displays – almost one in every twenty Australians at that time. To accommodate the Model A, new presses at been installed at Norlane, allowing for an extra three inches of interior space as had been requested by Australian buyers. In the end, 32,387 Model As were assembled at Norlane between 1928 and 1932, but their best market penetration in the first year was only about 20 percent, compared to 34 percent for GM.

In addition, the changeover was the final straw for the old distributor network. To tide them over while the factories in Detroit and Windsor retooled for the new model, Ford made a huge final batch of Model Ts and sent them out to the dealers – who were expected to accept and pay for them up front. Those who didn't usually lost their franchise, and given many of them were already under financial strain after the takeover by Hubert French, it wasn't unusual to see once-thriving Ford distributors wound up around this time.

Plan B
It will not shock you to learn Ford followed up the Model A with the Model B, yet another increment on the Model T theme. It came in two trim levels (Standard and Deluxe) and a number of body styles, with prices starting at just $490 for the coupé (almost $11,300 in 2024) up to $650 ($15,000) for a convertible sedan. The engine was yet another iteration of the same four-cylinder unit that had powered the Model T (albeit with tweaks to the balancing and lube system), which was both good and bad. On the upside, that meant servicing and maintenance was easy, and spares were already available everywhere: On the other hand, it meant the B was immediately upstaged by its own stablemate, the Model 18.

Flathead V8, appropriately enough from what seems to be the Canadian brochure, year unknown (Source: Curbside Classic)

The Model 18 hit the market on 25 August 1932, just months after the opening of Sydney Harbour Bridge. It was mechanically identical to the Model B, except for one notable exception – this was the first affordable, mass-market car to feature a V8 engine.² The advertising slogan was, "65 horsepower – 65 miles an hour", and owners soon found it was no exaggeration. With a dizzying 48 kW available at 3,400rpm, the 3.6-litre side-valve V8 was such a success that by 1935 it was the only engine Ford's American factories were producing. Only two factories in the world were capable of producing the so-called "flathead" V8: The Windsor plant built to replace the old Walkerville Wagon Works in Windsor, Ontario; and the enormous new River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan. Both were also capable of building four-cylinder engines, but Windsor only ever dispatched V8s to its Australian subsidiary. Fours earmarked for Australia all came from U.K., from Ford of Britain's Dagenham plant located on the Thames, just east of London.³

Since Norlane had now gained its own tool shop, these engines were fitted to chassis components also sourced from Canada. Major pressings such as the firewall, mudguards, running boards and bonnet were stamped out at Windsor, whereas lesser items like body panels, doors, interior trim, glass, battery, tyres and paint were all sourced locally. By this time, the Australian content of Ford's vehicles was approaching 75 percent.

Local pricing was varied. A rumble-seat "Sport Coupe" started at £327 ($38,800 in 2023), with the ragtop Roadster and Sport Phaeton models each going for £333 pounds ($39,500). The ultra-luxurious Town Car however cost a whopping £406 ($48,100), so it's no surprise it was a sales failure. Between the price, the economic times and the fact that no-one on the prowl for a luxury car ever visited a Ford dealership, only 1,200 Town Cars were ever sold in the U.S., never mind here. In tiny Australia, roughly 2,100 passenger cars left the line at Norlane between August 1932 and July 1933, of which 1,695 appear to have been V8s – figures which are remarkably close to Holden's around this time. But their crowning achievement came with Lewis Bandt's innovation on the Model B, the "coupé utility" – Australia's first ute. 

The story has been told many times, but according to an interview five decades later, the idea had come from a letter that crossed managing director Hubert French's desk. It had been written by a Gippsland farmer's wife, and she'd had enough of riding to church in their open-sided farm truck and arriving with her Sunday best soaked in mud. This being the dark heart of the Depression, credit had tightened in recent years and bank managers would lend a farmer money to buy farming equipment, but not a passenger car.

Her letter said, "Why don't you build people like us a vehicle to to go church in on a Sunday and which can carry our pigs to market on Mondays?"

The letter arrived on the desk of managing director Hubert French who, rather than dropping it in the round filing cabinet, passed it on to sales manager Scott Inglis instead. He in turn showed it to plant superintendent Slim Westman, who passed it to company's newly-formed Design Group. In 1934, the Design Group consisted of exactly one person, a 22-year-old South Australian named Lewis Thornet Bandt.

Even then he had a reputation as a gifted designer, and Ford had already singled him out for greater things. The concept of taking the front end of one of the new V8 coupés and marrying it to the cargo tray of a lorry had been kicking around for a while – Henry Ford himself is sometimes credited with inventing the pickup as far back as 1912, when he modified a Model T with a cargo box on his own farm – but Bandt was the first to design a vehicle that was actually sound. He began by sketching the vehicle on a ten-metre blackboard, depicting a front view as well as side and rear elevations.

Slim Westman came to me one day and said he wanted the front end of a V8 sedan combined with a utility tray. He said Australian farmers needed a vehicle with more passenger protection and comfort – a vehicle which would give them all the comfort and economy of a family sedan and still have the carrying capacity of a light truck.

The whole thing had already started to germinate. Westman quite rightly reckoned that if we cut down a car and put a tray on the back, the whole thing would tear in half once there was weight in the back.

I told him I would design it with a frame that came from the very back pillar, through to the central pillars, near the doors. I would arrange for another pillar to further strengthen that weak point where the cabin and tray joined. I said to Westman, "Boss, them pigs are going to have a luxury ride around the city of Geelong!"

What made Bandt's design different from American-style pickups was that he'd started with an ordinary passenger car, not a light truck. Your average pickup could be converted back to a cab-chassis simply by unbolting the tray: That couldn't happen with a ute, whose tray was integrated into the body with unique panels. That meant the ute had the comfortable driving experience and all-weather cabin of a car, while also providing a 1.6-metre cargo tray with 545kg load capacity. When the design was seen by Westman some weeks later, he authorised Bandt to build two prototypes.

On first sight of the prototypes, Scott Inglis authorised a startup production run of 500 vehicles. Westman asked for – and got – £10,000 for tooling, and the first coupé utilities rolled off the Norlane assembly line in 1934. Later, two Geelong-built examples were sent to Dearborn for the suits in the U.S. to inspect. Bandt accompanied them on the trip, and recalled:

Mr Ford called in his men from Texas. They took one look and asked, "What's that?" Mr Ford replied: "It's a kangaroo chaser" and told them he was about to build a model there.

Bandt's coupé utility was so good it forced GM-H to follow suit, with utes for both Chevrolet and Bedford on sale later in the year. The humble ute was already on its way to Aussie icon status – and given the state of the economy at the time, that was no bad thing.

¹ Although it must be said James D. Mooney of GM received the same award, and for the same reason. GM owned Opel and built the Nazis their Blitz trucks, after all, and it's rumoured Sloan didn't bother to resign from Opel's board during the war.

² Technically Cadillac had debuted the first mass-produced V8 engine way back in 1914, but that was a far more exclusive and expensive car than the Ford.

³ It was supplemented by the Model Y, also known as the Ford 8 after its piddling 8hp English Sidevalve engine.

1904-1927: The Origins of Ford Australia

While Holden's origins lie in the safe, sleepy CBD of Adelaide, the origins of Ford Australia must be sought much further afield, in a far-off land shrouded in myth and legend... Canada. 

The Promised Land
Freshwater lakes, ice hockey and maple syrup: Canada is land of contrasts. It's also basically the inverse of Australia – a huge, sparsely-populated country of vast plains and stark natural beauty, but forbiddingly cold rather than punishingly hot¹. That Ford's journey to our shores involved a detour there, however, is owed to another shared quirk: We were both members of the British Commonwealth at a time when that actually meant something.

The Canadian in question was Gordon Morton McGregor, and he was the son of William McGregor, the president of a wagon company based in Walkerville, Ontario. Gordon took over management of the company in 1901, and upon the death of his father in 1903, became its president as well. At a meeting with his brothers Walter and Donald in 1904, Gordon is reported to have said: "There are men in Detroit who say every farmer will soon be using an automobile. I don't see why we can not build them here in the wagon factory." That led to a deal with no lesser creature than Henry Ford, to build Ford automobiles for sale throughout the Commonwealth, apart from Britain.

Inside Walkerville Wagon Works, c.1914. Every Australian Ford built before 1925 passed through here. (Source: Windsor Prints)

The McGregors were in prime position to take on this business – literally, as their position was in the city of Windsor, right across the river from Detroit, Michigan. Like Albury-Wodonga, Windsor and Detroit are effectively one city, even though a river border runs between them², and Ford had just opened his first proper factory at 461 Piquette Avenue, Detroit³, replacing the rented plant at 588-592 Mack Avenue. In 1904, Canada was already a self-governing Dominion but, unlike Australia (which still used British pounds), Canada had been using the loonie since 1857. This unique positioning halfway between the U.S. and U.K. gave Canadian businesses a bit more leeway when it came to currency exchange and trade, making the McGregors Ford's gateway to Australia.

It was a good moment to ally with Ford, as in 1906 they'd produced 8,729 of the 33,200 cars built in the U.S. In 1907, Ford alone was responsible for 35 percent of the American market and starting to look further afield. They reportedly saw Australia, "as their largest single foreign market", and began efforts to organise their business here. In August 1909, the head of Ford of Canada dispatched R.J. Durance and his wife Ivy to the Port of Melbourne to set up an office and establish a distributor in each state. The initial appointments were:

• NSW: Davis & Fehon Motors Ltd 
• Vic: Tarrant Motor Company 
• SA: Duncan & Fraser Ltd.⁴ 
• Qld: Queensland Motor Company
• WA: Graves & Dwyer Motors Ltd
• Tas: D.R.S. Nettleford & Co.

Each of these distributors gained the sole right to import Fords from the McGregor plant in Windsor, each working out their own import arrangements, spare parts supply and pricing. From there, local garages were encouraged to service Ford products and fit only genuine spare parts, which they bought through the relevant state distributor.

The Model T
In 1909, the Ford in question could only be the evergreen Model T, a car destined to remain in production for nearly twenty years. The Model T had debuted on 1 October 1908, and it was an immediate hit in its native U.S. The perfect car for the times, it was a machine of pure functionality and no fat. It was powered by a 177ci (2.9-litre) side-valve four-cylinder engine that developed 20 brake horsepower (15 kW). It had a two-speed epicyclic transmission and could achieve a maximum speed of 70km/h, with an average fuel economy around 9 litres per 100km.

1915 Model T parked at Johnstone Park, with the GM Hitchcock Memorial Art Gallery visible in the background.

As early as 1909, it was clear that Henry Ford believed that he had developed a completely perfect motor vehicle, as that year he adopted the same development policy the Soviets had used with the T-34: "No new models, no new motors, no new bodies, and no new colours." No modification was accepted unless it made the Model T cheaper and faster to build, which partly explains how the asking price dropped from an initial $825 to just $259 (just over $28,000 to $4,600 in 2024 USD) by the time production ended. In 1912, he even asserted that the car could not be improved, and given a staggering 15,007,003 Model Ts would be built by the time the lines shut down, in the moment that probably didn't seem so absurd. In 1921, Ford held 55.7 percent of the US market, while arch-rival General Motors languished on just 12.7 percent. By the time it was finally dropped, half the cars ever built were Model Ts.

[As an aside, this period is doubtless the origin of the apocryphal phrase, "You can have any colour, as long as it's black." This was in fact only true for U.S.-built Model Ts produced between 1914 and 1926: Black Japan Varnish was indeed the preferred finish, but only because that particular enamel dried faster than anything else on the market. Earlier models had come in a broad range of colours, and the invention of Duco by DuPont in the 1920s, combined with flagging sales, eventually forced Henry to bring back the rest of the rainbow by 1926.]

The Model T proved as big a hit in Australia as it had in the U.S. and, more than any other vehicle, is credited with motorising the great southern land. Mr and Mrs Durance had brought with them a brace of fully-assembled Model Ts and demonstrated them to Australian country towns, with great effect. Durance famously declared, "Ford agencies were appointed anywhere smoke came out of a chimney," and they did their job well, with some 250,000 Model Ts ending up on our shores. Ford's share of the Australian market reached an astonishing 69 percent in January 1925, higher than Holden would ever achieve – yet it would fall to less than 35 percent within a few years.

1912 Model T at Gundagai Historical Museum (own work).

 

The Dalgety Plant
This early bull run was halted by changes to the situation both locally and Stateside. In Australia, the problem was the growing discontent with the distributors gouging their own sub-dealers, not just the customers. One example was the South Australian distributor, Duncan & Fraser (again), which had divided their state up into a system of "Urban Dealers" and "Limited Urban Dealers". The difference was that an Urban Dealer could sell anywhere, but a Limited Urban Dealer had to remain within their own territory – an arrangement that was clearly unfair, as at any time an Urban Dealer could step in and undercut a Limited Dealer's sales. Naturally, Duncan & Fraser hadn't forgotten to designate themselves an Urban Dealer, inciting plenty of resentment among their sub-dealers. It was like this everywhere, and it was serious enough that in 1923 Ford of Canada dispatched two of their executives, Hubert French and Mel Brooks (no relation), to sort it all out.

French wrote a comprehensive study recommending Ford replace the existing system of state distributors with a single in-house assembly plant. The state distributors remained mercifully unaware that the original proposal contained this bombshell until it was too late:

We would eliminate the present distributors – six in number – and turn their present sub dealers into main dealers. By doing so we could reduce the price of our product to the public approximately 10% and increase our dealer profit 33.3%.

In short, without any prior discussion – without even informing them, in fact – every state distributor was to be downgraded to just another dealer, effectively ending their monopolies.

Within three months of getting permission, Henry's son Edsel Ford had cleared $3 million to get the project up and running, and French and five other executives boarded a boat back to Australia. Upon arrival, one of their first tasks was to locate a suitable site for the new factory. The facility needed proximity to an urban centre to provide a good supply of labour, and it had to have a deep-water port to bring the kits into the country by ship. French had initially wanted Tasmania, but was talked into accepting Geelong, Victoria instead – then Australia's fourth-largest city, and soon to become one of the largest manufacturing hubs in the country, home to Ford, International Harvester, Shell and Alcoa. 

Norlane under construction, mid-1925.

French secured 100 acres owned by the Geelong Harbour Trust near Corio Bay, already home to a pub and an old wool store, in what would soon become the suburb of Norlane (traditionally Wathaurong land). To tide them over while it was under construction, French rented what has usually been described as a "disused wool shed"⁵ from Dalgety & Co. at the eastern end of Gheringhap Street.

On 31 March 1925, Ford incorporated two new companies: the Ford Manufacturing Company of Australia, and the Ford Motor Company of Australia. Split for tax purposes, they effectively operated as a single unit, with Hubert French as the first General Manager. One of the company's first actions was to block the state distributors from importing any more kits from Canada and pressured them to use up their existing stocks instead. They were told it was a strategy to clear the shelves of the excess cars they were choosing to hold onto in a declining market, but its real aim was to starve both the distributors and their customers of new cars, creating a "vacuum" for the new company to move into.

In fact, neither the distributors nor the infant Ford Australia would ever regain the numbers seen in the early 1920s – not with the Model T, at least. As we know, the economic headwinds started early for Australia, and the numbers tell the tale. In the last three months of 1924, Duncan & Fraser sold 263 Fords in South Australia. In January 1925, the total dropped to just 66. February saw a rebound to 143, but then March dropped to 125; April, 92; May, 65; and June, a mere 42.

Model Ts lined up outside Dalgety's, 1925.

Nevertheless. on 1 July 1925, Ford Australia officially unveiled the first locally-assembled Model T, built from a CKD (Complete Knock Down) kit manufactured in Canada, and priced at a very competitive £185 (just shy of $18,500 in 2023). There were three colours available: Empire Grey, Cobalt Blue and Imperial Buff. They began rolling off the rather primitive, 12-metre Dalgety assembly line on 25 July, but at first they were available in only limited numbers. The supply chain had been disrupted to make sure everything now flowed through Geelong, meaning Duncan & Fraser had to ship their custom coachbuilt bodies interstate on a train, only to get them back later as completed motor cars weeks later. Worse, what came back was typically of rather poor quality, and the time delay before finished cars returned to their dealership was crippling. July 1925 was a new low for Duncan & Fraser, with only 24 completed cars delivered that month.

Norlane
Fortunately (for the company, at least), by the end of the year Ford had a proper assembly plant ready to go. It was located at the corner of Melbourne and North Shore Roads, Norlane, and it featured a rather charming façade of red brick and whitewashed concrete pillars, capped off with an odd "inside-out" roofline. This was to be the headquarters and manufacturing base of the first major overseas car company to set up shop in Australia, and the first large factory in Victoria designed for mass production using assembly lines. Ford would still be using it in one capacity or another right up until they ceased manufacturing in 2016.

When it was first built, the Norlane plant was surrounded by farmland. Today? Not so much. (Source: Facebook)

That meant for 1926, Ford were able to proudly announce their new, "improved" Model T – which was basically just the old one, except it now had an all-steel body stamped out at Norlane instead of a wooden one coachbuilt by, just for example, Steenbhom Motor Bodies of Alexandria, NSW. The Prussian-born Aaron Moses Steenbhom had immigrated to Australia in the 1850s, and his descendants had began a coachbuilding company in the horse-and-buggy days, only turning to motor bodies around 1905. The first car bought by hire purchase in Australia had in fact been a Steenbhom-bodied Ford, but with Norlane online such boutique manufacturers were surplus to requirements, and Steenbhom quietly closed down in 1927.

Sadly, such is often the cost of progress, and it was going to get worse before it got better.

Closer shot of Norlane, c.1935. (Source: Lovell Chen)

 

¹ I cannot even imagine what negative thirty Celcius must feel like. I've worked with commercial freezers that operate at that sort of temperature, but the idea of walking outside and experiencing that just shorts out my brain.

² A quirk of the border in this area was that the U.S. actually lies on the northern side of the river, with Canada to the south.

³ Ironically, only a stone's throw from Fisher Body where the Holden prototypes would one day be built.

⁴ As is their wont, Broken Hill answered to Adelaide rather than Sydney.

⁵ It says a lot about my upbringing, I think, that that phrase led me to picture a literal shearing shed. Looking up the address on Google Maps, however, reveals a dockside warehouse instead, which makes a lot more sense.

1954: The Mount Druitt 24 Hour

It was Australia's first 24-hour enduro: It was also the last for almost half a century. The twice-around-the-clock classic at Mount Druitt produced a famous win but, seventy years on, the circumstances of its running seem in danger of being lost to Father Time. So let's dig into it.

Source: YouTube

If You Build Very Little, They Will Still Come
In the early 1950s, there was nothing in Australia like Mount Druitt – a tarmac-sealed, honest-to-God permanent racetrack, not some dirt track or closed-off loop of public roads. Like so many circuits in those days, it had been built on one of the many RAAF aerodromes dotting the country in the aftermath of World War II. While some were still considered operational, others had been relegated to emergencies-only status, and these proved the seed crystal of the early Sydney motorsport scene. Schofields and Marsden Park each saw some level of motorsport action, while Castlereagh eventually became the backbone of local drag racing. Mount Druitt however had a different destiny.

In its early days Mount Druitt was as primitive as could be, a simple paperclip oval à la Martinsville laid out around a pair of hairpins 1,200 metres apart, marked by empty fuel drums. There were virtually no amenities, and precious little to shield you from the Daystar, but even so the entertainment-starved public came in droves. Crowds of 15,000 weren't unusual, partly explained by the sheer accessibility of the place – it was located on the very doorstep of Sydney, near Ropes Creek (and not a million miles from the future site of Sydney Motorsport Park). The main train line to Penrith brought spectators to Mount Druitt station and from there it was only a thirty-minute walk through the paddocks to the airstrip at the bottom of the hill. Alternatively, if you were lucky enough to be driving one of these newfangled Holdens, the Great Western Highway ran parallel to the rail line, bringing road traffic to the circuit via a dusty and narrow side road (which was inevitably clogged with vehicles on race days).

Races had been run on the airstrip as early as 1948, but in 1950 the circuit was leased to one Belfred Jones – a part-time racer and full-time entrepreneur from Old North Wales, who ran a company called Speed Promotions from an office in the grand-but-dilapidated Centenary House at the crown of the hill. With the advent of Belf Jones, Mount Druitt became the host circuit of Australian Racing Drivers Club, and plans began to gestate for something far more ambitious. Over the following 18 months the club began tar-sealing a series of access roads that ran down the hill through the scrub to both ends of the airstrip. To link these together, a new section of bitumen was laid at the top of the hill, which became the new pit straight.

The result was an anti-clockwise 3.6 kilometre circuit. From the starting line on top of the hill, a sweeping left-hander dropped sharply through a slight right-left kink to a very fast double right-hand corner that led onto the airstrip. 200 metres later, the track did a sharp U-turn around the old oil drums and ran back down the strip, before another very quick left hander sent competitors back up the hill to a sharp adverse-camber right-hander around a dam, then followed a looping left leading back onto pit straight. The circuit was far from perfect, being rather narrow and prone to breaking up, but it was fast and flowing and extremely popular with drivers and, thanks to its location in a gentle valley, provided excellent viewing to spectators.

Mount Druitt in its 1955 configuration (Source: Speedwayandroadracehistory.com)

From its opening motorcycle meeting on 16 November 1952, the track became the Mecca for road racers whose only other venue in the state was the once-a-year Easter meeting at Mount Panorama. Indeed, motorcycles made up the bulk of the early race meetings, conducted by various clubs such as the Motor Cycle Racing Club, Willoughby DMCC, and the Auto Cycle Union. In 1954 however the bikes were relegated to a support category for something far more grandiose, as on that year's Anniversary Weekend the circuit committed itself to hosting a 24-Hour Race for Production Cars – Australia's first endurance race.

It was a brave move, as Mount Druitt didn't have any kind of lighting system to illuminate the track, so it was going to get awfully dark through the long hours of night. On the other hand, the substantial £3,000 promised to the victor (nearly $128,000 in 2023) was sure to attract racers from every corner of the country. The start time was set for 2:00pm on Sunday, 31 January 1954, with the event to finish twenty-four hours later on Monday, 1 February (which was that year's Invasion Day public holiday, presumably because 26 January itself had been a Tuesday, which difficult to make into a long weekend).

Official programme. (Source: The Motor Racing Programmes Project)

This was well before Australia had developed its own enduro traditions, so the model they were working from was of course the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Le Mans was the new hotness at the time, as Jaguar had taken their first-ever victory in 1951 thanks to the XK120C of Peter Walker and Peter Whitehead – followed up in 1953 with another win for the C-Type (driven by Tony Rolt, a pioneer of 4WD and one of the team behind the glider project in Colditz. His co-driver was Duncan Hamilton, famously the world's most plastered racing driver). Jaguar would in fact go on to take a hat-trick of wins with their D-Type in 1955, '56 and '57, before Aston Martin finished off the British Decade in 1959 with a win for their DBR1. Endurance racing was very "in" among the Commonwealth, and Belf Jones was not someone to leave a promotional opportunity on the table. Like the French classic, all cars entered had to be ordinary production models racing as they left the factory (bar the removal of mufflers), and crewed by at least two drivers, who would have to sprint to their cars when the race commenced.

She's Got a Jaaag
Twenty-two teams stepped forward to try their hand, among them a handful of names that are familiar even today. Doug Chivas was there, twenty years before he pushed Brock's HDT Torana at Bathurst, already 31 and scheduled to co-drive the #20 MG TD entered by Lowe's Service Station. Ken Tubman, a Maitland chemist by day but more recently winner of the 1953 Redex Round-Australia Trial, had decided to try his luck in a Peugeot 203 similar to the one that had served him so well in the Redex. One of his co-drivers was David McKay, a dapper Sydney journalist and prestige car dealer equally known for his moustache and his stutter, who would go on to found Scuderia Veloce (in its day, Australia's greatest racing team) and claim the first-ever Australian Touring Car Championship. Even Belf Jones himself had decided to join in, entering a #7 Austin A90 Atlantic in an attempt to keep the prize money in the family.

But if you were serious about winning you needed the right tool for the job, and in the early fifties that could only be a Jag: Enter Westco Motors, stage right. Westco was owned by Cyril Anderson, a Queenslander in the midst of building his Western Transport business into one of the largest trucking concerns in the country (he'd established the business in Toowoomba in 1934 with a single two-tonne truck, but at his peak would be running a fleet of over 500 trucks and trailers). As a side hustle, he and his wife Doris Anderson – better known as "Geordie" – also ran Westco Motors, the Jaguar franchise for Queensland and the Northern Territory. It was run from a showroom located on the corner of Melbourne and Merivale Streets in South Brisbane, and from there Geordie was a fixture of the local racing scene, frequently pairing up with fellow Queenslander Bill Pitt (also destined to be an early Australian Touring Car Champion), and Charlie "Chas" Swinburne (who in at least one newspaper is listed as her son, but I don't know if there's any truth to that).

With an open line to the factory in Coventry, Geordie Anderson had been able to get her hands on a Jaguar XK120 FHC, one of the first ever built (chassis no S669015). Named for its 120mph top speed, it sported a 3.4-litre Jaguar straight-six capable of 120 kW at 5,000rpm, and 265 Nm of torque at 2,500. This engine had been designed during the war to while away the long hours of blackout, with the intention of powering a new four-door sedan that could be sold to the Americans. When the engine was ready before the car, however, Sir William Lyons decided to put it in the front of a fairly conventional two-door sports coupé – which upon its launch at the Earl's Court motor show in 1948, immediately became the world's fastest production car. 0-100 in ten seconds flat was a world away from the matronly, 19-second Holden. 

If you're about my age, this is the car James May drove in Top Gear's "Race in 1949", S13E01. (Source: The Beeb)

There were a number of variations on the theme, with Mrs Anderson's being the FHC or Fixed Head Coupé model, denoting its hard roof (as opposed to the DHC, or Drophead Coupé, with its foldaway canvas roof). The price for one of these started at £1,200 (just over £35,000 in 2023), but that was in Great British Pounds – what that worked out to once the car came to Australia and added import fees and taxes is anyone's guess. This was the machine Mrs Anderson proposed to enter in the Mount Druitt 24-Hour, and as formidable as it was, she nevertheless had her work cut out for her. Because there was another Jag on the entry list. Enter Peter Whitehead, stage left.

Peter Whitehead was a scion of a wealthy British wool dynasty, and this was actually his second visit to the colonies. The first had come immediately before the war, when he'd made a business trip to talk turkey with local wool growers and, on the side, won the 1938 Australian Grand Prix in a privately-owned ERA. The intervening war years had arguably taken away the peak of his driving career, but demand for woollen uniforms had apparently done his family fortune no harm, as upon returning to Australia he'd brought along his very own Jaguar XK120C – identical to the one he'd driven to victory at Le Mans in 1951.

Whitehead on his way to victory at la Sarthe, 1951. The car behind is the Aston Martin DB2 of Reg Parnell; the Jags would beat another DB2 at Mount Druitt (Source).

The C stood for "Competition", as it was the open-top racing version of the XK120, built especially to compete at Le Mans (and then hurriedly put into production afterward to legitimise the win). It gave privateers access to a race-tuned version of Jaguar's 3.4-litre six, capable of 157 kW – 37 more than the standard car. Getting to 100km/h took a mere eight seconds, and with the right gearing it was capable of 225km/h (or more, if you removed the token windscreens). Jaguar ultimately built 54 and asked only £1,500 for them, one of which was an ex-works car sold "virtually direct" to Peter Whitehead. To help with the driving, Whitehead had opted for local expertise in the persons of Alf Barrett, well-known maestro of Australian racing, and expat sports car ace Tony Gaze – the same Tony Gaze who'd recently driven a Holden in the Monte Carlo Rally.

It was a solid plan, but then it ran smack into the realities of life in Australia.

The Messy Breakup
For the Sydney basin, the month leading up to race day was one of rain, with thirteen out of the 31 days of January marked either by drizzle or heavy showers. Compounding this, the period immediately before the race included a substantial eight-day downpour, followed by more rain on the preceding Friday. Then, after the drivers had sprinted to their cars to begin the arduous 24-hour marathon, the heavens opened and drenched the circuit yet again. The motorcycle contingent were very thankful they'd got their races in on the Saturday, as the pits and spectator areas became a quagmire and the track surface quickly began to break up.

Detailed sources are tough to come by seventy years after the fact, and nothing I've read explicitly mentions cold-mix tarmac, but the surface has been described as "flimsy" and the whole facility had clearly been done on a tight budget. With cold-mix being the cheaper option, it seems logical that's what Belf Jones would've gone with, and now everyone was paying the price. Motorcycles and flyweight Grand Prix cars were one thing, but heavy production cars on slim pizza-cutter tyres were quite another, and the potholes that were soon sinking through the tarmac and into the mud beneath it were deep and devastating.

Their first victim was Mrs Anderson, who had to pit at 9:25pm with carburettor woes. The Jag had been running into potholes so hard the engine had been rocking on its mounts until it one of its two SU carburettors struck the steering column, and either snapped off an adjusting nut or cracked a float bowl – a problem that only afflicted right-hand drive cars. As luck would have it, however, someone in the crowd had driven to the track on just such a carb, so with this Samaritan's permission the team got out the spanners and commandeered the carb, carrying on the race in a more phlegmatic manner.

They were far from the only runners to hit trouble, however. An Aston Martin DB2 retired with a cracked timing case and "shot" engine mounts, and even a Holden pitted just after dawn with a broken rear leaf. A hush fell over the crowd, however, when the leading Whitehead Jag pulled into the sodden pits around 11:30pm with a rear suspension locating link broken, the car having hit a pothole at over 160km/h. Alf Barrett had been the one at the wheel at the time, so it seemed local expertise meant little when the rains came down and you couldn't see what was waiting for you in the dark. The link was welded up and the car sent back out, but two hours later it stopped again with a broken radius rod.

That left Mrs Anderson and her boys clear to run out the clock at their leisure – there was nothing else on the track fast enough to keep up with them, and certainly not in such shocking conditions. They ultimately took the chequered flag with 573 laps, or 2,063km of distance on the board. They finished four laps ahead of the 2nd-placed Bristol 400 of Gordon Greig, Bill Reynolds and Peter Vennermark (despite the roll-over seen in the video above!), and ten laps ahead of the 3rd-placed Humber Super Snipe. A Holden 48-215 managed 4th, while Dowling and McKay brought their Peugeot 203 home in 5th. All 22 entrants were classified at the finish, even if a lot of them did it by the time-worn expedient of waiting for the time to run out and then limping across the line! Mrs Anderson's crew had won the race at an average speed of just 85km/h, which on paper compared poorly with the 170km/h of the previous year's Le Mans, but then again Mount Druitt was much shorter and twistier circuit. And considering the rain, the pitch darkness and the damage being done to the track surface, even 85 was probably a touch reckless. And of course, with the job done, they promptly returned the borrowed carburettor to its rightful owner!

Winners are grinners: The trio after their hard-earned victory. (Source: Wikipedia)

However, the race went down as a complete disaster in the annals of Australian racing, poorly-run and dogged by an almost total lack of crowd control. It took months to get the track into usable shape again, with the numerous potholes refilled by hand rather than by complete resurfacing. Unsurprisingly the race was never run again, and Australia would not see another 24-hour enduro for almost five decades. A pair of 24-hour races for motorcycles would be run in the following years, and those would prove equally chaotic, but their stories belong to a different blog than mine.

The win was nevertheless a huge boost for Jaguar's profile in Australia, and Westco Motors saw plenty of dentists and barristers visit their showroom in the years ahead. Geordie Anderson and Bill Pitt would remain in cahoots for the next decade, but poor Charlie Swinburne (whether family or not) took ill and died in the late 1950s, apparently of cancer. One wonders what else he might've achieved had he lived a little longer.

One extra detail I want to finish with, however, highlights the difference between Australia and the U.S. Later in the year, on 13 June, an XK120 FHC just like Mrs Anderson's became the first imported car to win a NASCAR Grand National race, when Al Keller drove it to victory at the Linden Airport race in New Jersey. The difference is that in Australia, Jaguar would remain a mainstay of local racing for decades to come, with plenty of silverware in their future in both sports and touring cars. The Americans, on the other hand, grimly handed Keller his winnings and then banned foreign cars on the spot!

1953: The Holden FJ

On the farm, on the street, in the garages of suburbia and red dust of the outback, a myriad of brands found themselves swept aside by the coming of the Holden. The factories at Woodville and Fishermans Bend couldn't build them fast enough, and Holden salesmen bragged they had the easiest job in the world. It seemed the company could do no wrong, so when the time came to retool for a new model... well, how iconic do you like your cars?

Kangaroo Kaizan
The 48-215 didn't stand still in its five years on sale. Even when they were selling every car they made, running updates were the order of the day at GM-H, as even after exhaustive testing in both Michigan and Australia, the Holden suffered niggling durability problems. Most serious of these was the tendency of the rear leaves to crack on early models, leading to a suspension upgrade in March 1953 that introduced telescopic shock absorbers and wider leaf springs for extra strength.

Four months later, Holden greased their fleet credentials with the aptly-named Business model, aimed squarely at the fleet buyers. Officially it was known as the 48-217 (or even the 48-215-217, which is the sort of thing better read by an IBM than frail human eyes), and while it's not clear to me exactly which extras it offered, the parts catalogue mentions mudflaps front-and-rear, Venetian blinds and cigarette lighters. Presumably, this reflects certain options only making financial sense if they were ordered from the suppliers in bulk, and then fitted on the line in batches (though if you absolutely had to have it and your chequebook didn't flinch, your local dealer was always at your disposal). That said, the Business was only produced at Woodville, which suggests the body itself took a little something extra to produce.

Holden bodies on the line at Woodville, 1949. (Source: Primotipo)

But there was no denying the Holden was a pretty bare-bones package. If you were being kind you might've called it minimalist: If you were less generous, you might say it was the next thing up from a Willys Jeep. What the customers would need in a follow-up model were more creature comforts, so that's exactly what Holden gave them.

Frugal Genius
The Holden FJ was a landmark in several important ways. For one, it kicked off Holden's "secret" two-letter naming code, where the letters stood for the number of its year of release, but in reverse order. By this system, "F-J" stood for "5-2" – model year 1952 – so it's just as well the system was so obfuscating. It helped hide that when it arrived in October 1953, the FJ was almost a year behind schedule.

The FJ also began the proud industry tradition of touching up a car halfway through its lifespan and calling it a new model, but there would be few facelifts as successful as this one. On paper, jazzing up a fundamentally-1930s shape with a jukebox grille, silly chrome fins and shiny new hub caps shouldn't be a recipe for success. And yet... when Peter Brian needed a stage name to match the fifties-nostalgia image of his band Ol' 55¹, what did he land on? Frankie J. Holden. And when GM-H decided to create a concept car as a gift to themselves for their fiftieth birthday, what did they call it? The Efijy. For cultural valence the FJ is unmatched, and no wonder: After the rather serious 48-215, the feelgood FJ was light-hearted and cheerful, a sign the hard times were finally over.

No-one with vines on their house ever bought a Holden, of course, but in advertising vibes always beat veracity.

It's true that dazzling new radiator grille hogged all the attention, but the FJ was more than just a pretty face. When it launched at the Fishermans Bend Social Hall in October 1953, it was available in four basic variants: the Standard sedan, with a list price of £870 ($37,000 in 2023; with on-roads, it was more like £1,023, or seventeen months' wages at the time); the Business sedan (£895, or $38,000); and the tarted-up Special, which offered the first glimpses of comfort in a locally-made car. If you could stand the £915 asking price ($39,000), the Special got you front door armrests, rear passenger assist straps, window winders and a cigarette lighter, and an interior light turned on when you opened the door. The big news however was the "Elasco-Fabulous" vinyl seats with two-tone colour schemes – it was the mid 20th Century, so it was completely unacceptable to encounter any kind of natural fibre (although it must be said early FJ Specials carried over the previous model's tough leather). There were also new exterior colours like Lithgow Cream, Mortlake Blue and Trentham Green.

The FJ interior was to the 48-215 as the Labor Party is to the Coalition: Same thing, but a nicer tone.

The fourth variant was the ute (£875, or $37,000), while the fifth came along in December 1953 – the all-new panel van, which debuted with the FJ range. Retailing for £890 ($38,000) plus tax, it was visibly just a utility with a roof welded on, but that roof enclosed 2.3 cubic metres of cargo volume, rated for 336kg (a little behind the ute's 375kg, but sometimes you have to keep stuff dry). Like the Business, the panel van was only produced at Woodville – all other models could be built at any plant with a body shop, which in 1953 finally included Pagewood (the Sydney plant at last ceasing the manufacture of Frigidaires and rejoining the motor industry).

Holden didn't invent the panel van, but they would certainly make it their own in the years ahead. (Source: Classic Car Catalogue)

There were no other mechanical upgrades over the 48-215, but in truth none were needed at this stage. The FJ added attractive Buddy Holly styling and new levels of kit without losing the 48-215's strengths – comfort, ruggedness, sprightly performance, fuel economy and unbelievable value for money. It also became the first Aussie car to be exported, with an initial batch of 30 sent to New Zealand, soon followed by a further 321 – not huge numbers by any measure, but a moment of pride for a country long used to importing. And on the second-hand market the FJ became a common and beloved first car for the larval Baby Boomer generation. No wonder it became such an icon, with 169,969 of them leaving the showrooms in its three years on the market – much to the chagrin of Holden's rivals, whose sales were rapidly heading in the opposite direction.

Spanners Out
The sudden availability of the car in Australia triggered a matching rise in motor racing. There had been racing here before Holden, of course – the first Australian Grand Prix had been held at Phillip Island in 1928 – but hitherto it had mainly been restricted to open-wheelers and sports cars, which required serious money to buy and run. There was such a thing as sedan racing, known as "touring car" racing (to contrast with "racing cars", you see), but they were regarded as a support category, where the Grand Prix drivers would often compete in the vehicles they used to tow their racing cars. With newspaper classifieds and wrecker's yards rapidly filling up with old Holdens, however, motor racing became a practicable hobby for the emerging middle class. One driver who spent his childhood in this era later described it thus:

Racing was a very social event back then and all you needed to enter any race was a Confederation of Australian Motor Sport (CAMS) licence, a car and a pair of balls. It was more like going to play a game of golf than going to an event like a V8 Supercars race today.

There were three main categories in Australia; Open Wheelers, Sports Cars and Touring Cars. The Open Wheelers were probably the big deal, followed by the Sports Cars and then the Touring Cars. Open Wheelers and Sports Cars were fast and expensive. You had to have specialised cars, and big-name international drivers like David Myles, Graham Hill and Pedro Rodriguez would come over to race, which added to the glitz and glamour of those categories.

In the Touring Cars category, you could race just about anything, even an old FJ, so this was the one for me. There were three main levels in this category: local, state and national. We would have ten local meetings a year between Lowood and Lakeside. They were very informal and fought out between a bunch of mates. The state races were less frequent and a little more prestigious. Every couple of years there’d be a race at the national level, such as the Australian Grand Prix. Even at these big national events, the only entry requirement was a CAMS licence. You weren’t ranked and you didn’t need to have a certain number of wins – just three stripes ripped off on the back of a card to show that you’d done three races. If there weren’t enough entries in one particular race, they would mix up the categories and often put open and closed sports cars in with the touring cars to make up the field. – Dick Johnson, Dick Johnson: The Autobiography

A Holden was the ideal tool for this job. Whether a 48-215 or an FJ, a Holden gave you a light, stiff body that didn't cost an arm and leg, with spare parts available practically everywhere, and fitted with one of the most upgradeable engines ever made – the 132ci Grey six. Holden had deliberately left a lot on the table with the Grey, which in its factory spec was held back by conservative spark timing and a very low compression ratio. With a little knowledge (and some care about your fuel), you could find some gains just via more aggressive distributor settings, without even thinking about splashing out on new parts. Bump up the compression, start hunting for a hotter cam and swap the standard carburettor for something aftermarket (Amal motorcycle carbs were the hot ticket to those in the know), and you were well on your way to becoming a racer. It wasn’t long before there was a thriving industry for hot Holdens, providing tuning tips and parts to those with a need for speed.

Jumpin' Jack
This was the "outlaw era" of touring car racing, when the races were staged by a multitude of promoters in different states, each with their own set of rules (which were only enforced when the scrutineers were in the mood anyway). The king of this era was one Jack Myers, and although it's touch and go whether you've even heard of him, he was the original Holden Hero, the first of a line that would run through Beechey, Brock, Lowndes and Skaife before terminating with Shane van Gisbergen's epic victory lap at Bathurst in 2020.

Myers at Mount Druitt, Sydney, sometime in the early 1950s (Source: Primotipo)

Based in the Sydney suburb of Kingsford, Myers was a mechanic and parts retailer by day, but a backyard engineer and racer on weekends. He spent the early 1950s in a yellow Holden 48-215 he described as "fairly stock", yet would do 110mph (177km/h) on a long enough straight! Even better, for a mere £130 ($5,400 in 2023), Myers was offering to turn your car into a 100mph Holden too. His modifications involved boring out your block to 3³/¹⁶ inches, fitting new pistons and rings, a shaved head, new cam grind, twelve inner valve-springs, an additional Stromberg carb, custom Myers inlet manifold and extractors, sports air-cleaners and a Lukey muffler. Even so he saved his best stuff for himself, and for three years he was next to unbeatable on the track. When he won a six-lap handicap race at Bathurst in October 1955, Jack Myers became the first man ever to take a Holden to victory at the Mountain.

The circuits of this era are a story unto themselves. Australian Muscle Car dipped a toe into these murky waters in the "Sacred Sites" portion of Issue #90, where they quoted Terry Walker's book Fast Tracks: Australia’s Motor Racing Circuits 1904-1995, describing the small country circuits of north-east Victoria as being sprinkled through the region like, "currants in a bun". The seven listed were Wangaratta, Barjarg, Bright, Hume Weir, Tarrawingee, Undera and Winton: Of these, Winton is the great survivor, and Hume Weir needs no introduction, but the rest are probably completely unfamiliar. Frustratingly, AMC only went into any detail with the Wangaratta/Tarrawingee saga, but to be fair there don't seem to be a lot of details out there about the rest.²

The Tarrawingee circuit more properly belongs to the late 1950s, but its origins lie here, in 1953, when the Wangaratta-based North Eastern Car Club gained the right to hold car and motorcycle races on the old Wangaratta Commons Airstrip (just out of town on Greta Road). The barrier between circuit and speedway racing was quite porous in those days, and all the moreso when road circuits tended to be short and had unsealed surfaces. So it was with Wangaratta, a short blast around a rather suggestive layout that could've been designed by Alan Davies. The club held events here for some four years before the drainage problems became too much, and when they were offered a parcel of land in the Tarrawingee Recreation Reserve, they packed up and moved there instead.

It was like this everywhere. In addition to Wangaratta, Victorians also raced on airfields at Ballarat and Fishermans Bend. In NSW, you might race at the established Mount Druitt or Panorama circuits, or you might take your car to the new Gnoo Blas road course just outside Orange instead. In South Australia, you could try your luck at the new Port Wakefield circuit (created to host the Australian Grand Prix, in the teeth of a state government ban on the use of public roads) or, if that crowd was a bit too serious, head for Gawler airstrip instead. In Tassie, since neither Symmons Plains nor Baskerville yet existed, it would have to be the Quorn Hall airstrip near Launceston. In Westralia, it was probably one of a multitude of layouts around (or within!) the south-western town of Collie.

The triumphs, tragedies, heroes and villains of this era of Australian racing are mostly lost to us today – but they existed. Knock off work on Friday arvo, spend the evening converting your daily drive, take it to the track and then have a brilliant weekend kicking up the dust with your mates. When Monday came around, you converted it back and drove it to work again, with no-one the wiser. It might not have been high-stakes racing, but it sounds like it was a lot of fun, and in the process the foundation was laid for what was to come. The Holden 48-215 and FJ in fact fulfilled the same role in Australian touring car racing the venerable '36 Ford coupé did in NASCAR – an inexpensive school for a generation of drivers, a fertile seed bed for the DIY hot-rodding skills of their mechanics, and a spectacular show for spectators who were drawn to the track in ever-increasing numbers.

Notes For Mod-Makers
I'm going to start signing off with some ideas for anyone who might want to make the mod for rFactor 2, Assetto Corsa, or whatever the Kids These Days™ are into. You might think a "Humpy Heaven" mod would be horribly slow and therefore boring, but I say (appropriately enough), not so fast! First of all, bear in mind the James May Principle – no, not "Christian motoring", the principle that a car becomes interesting at the limit of grip of its tyres. With the pizza-cutter crossplies of the era, a Humpy Holden wouldn't need a lot of power to be interesting, providing you got the physics and "car-feel" just right. Moreover, short tracks mean short straights, so the next corner would never be far away (and short tracks also tend to be crowded, meaning there'd be plenty of scope for elbows-out racing). And lastly – the most important factor, for my money – don't overlook the sheer variety of surfaces in this period. By my count there are four distinct surface types to race on here: dirt, oiled dirt³, cold-mix tarmac and hot-mix tarmac. Throw in that Assetto Corsa can model rain, dust and the process of rubbering-in across a weekend, and one need never run the same race meeting twice – and that's before you get into replicating the more extreme modifications the cars were undergoing by the end of the decade.

Too niche? Maybe. But I still think it would be fun, and also a handy way of preserving our motoring heritage for future generations (no, digital is no way to store anything long-term, but it would create some fond memories for people who might otherwise never hear about it). And I think anything's better than yet another GT3 league...

¹ You can tell someone's age by where they know Frankie J. Holden from. For me he'll always be Mr Gribbles from Round the Twist, and I had no idea he was in a band until I began researching this very blog. I didn't think I'd be running into Wilbur Wilde from Hey Hey It's Saturday either, until I saw the music video. There must've been a rule that to be on Australian TV in the '90s, you first had to be in a band in the '70s.

² All links go to speedwayandroadracehistory.com, a very Web 1.0 page, but no less fascinating for that. I recommend hitting up the "lost circuits" tab in your own time, as you're very likely to find something close to your town that you had no idea was ever there.

³ Did I forget to mention they'd often "seal" a track by pouring used motor oil all over it? Horrifying...