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.