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.