Ford celebrates 100 years in Australia

From building a local version of the iconic Model T, to serving generations of Aussie families with roomy and reliable family cars, and designing and engineering the nation’s best-selling contemporary vehicle, Ford Australia has been a key player in the local automotive industry, and Australian culture more generally for 100 years.

The company is marking the moment 100 years ago when the Ford Motor Company of Australia Pty Ltd was founded in Geelong, Victoria, an event that helped establish its US-based parent the Ford Motor Company as a truly global operation.

The genesis of the Blue Oval’s Antipodean operation began with a visit to Australia in 1923 by North American Ford executives who were searching for a base from where all Ford activities in the land down under could be managed.

After the visit, P. W. Grandjean, then secretary of Ford of Canada, wrote to Edsel Ford, who had taken over control of the company form his father Henry Ford just a few years earlier, suggesting that "the time is ripe to carry on a business in Australia with our own organisation.”

With its deep seaport, readily available land, access to nearby railways and good labour force, the rapidly growing Victorian city of Geelong was chosen as the base for the Blue Oval’s new Australian outpost, with operations beginning in 1925.

On 1 July 1 that year Ford’s first Australian-made Model T Ford rolled off the newly created assembly line.

Regarded as the first affordable automobile for the masses, the 1925 Australian Model T was a simple design but of solid construction, and cost around 185 pounds, or about $18,500 in today’s money.

Although known in the States as ‘Tin Lizzie’, Australia’s Model T was given the nickname the ‘Dalgety,’ a reference to the Dalgety Wool Store where the first vehicles were assembled.

Advertisement for 1938 Ford V8 Utility.

Production would move later that year to nearby Norlane, to another wool store converted for automotive assembly, where Ford’s original stamping plant was later established and where Falcon engine building operations continued until 2016 when local assembly ceased.

Ford Australia’s partnership with the Geelong Football Club, one of the oldest and most enduring in Australian sport also began in 1925, the same year the celebrated Aussie rules club clinched its first Victorian Football League premiership.

Geelong can also lay claim to being the place where the world’s first coupe-ute was designed and built.

The original vehicle came about as the result of a request in 1932 from a Gippsland farmer, who asked Ford to consider building a vehicle that could ‘take my wife to church on Sunday and carry my pigs in the back on Monday’.

Ford engineer Lew Bandt was tasked with the challenge of delivering such a vehicle and in 1934 Bandt and his team delivered what became known as the Ford Coupe-Utility.
The resulting coupe-utility style of vehicle would later become a mainstay of local vehicle manufacturing, with Ford introducing the first of seven-generations of Falcon-based utes in 1961.

Ford has remained strongly connected to the Geelong region and to local automotive design and engineering even after the end of local manufacturing via its You Yangs Proving Ground, located just 26km form Geelong, which continues to play a vital role in the development of vehicles for the local and international markets.

A 1960 XK Ford Falcon.

Along with Ford’s Campbellfield facility in Melbourne which is home to the company’s International Markets Group Product Development Centre, the two sites remain central to the design, development and engineering of the current generation Ford Ranger ute and Everest SUV.

To mark the centenary year, Ford fans can take a walk down memory lane through the Ford Heritage Vault, which is now live with nearly 2,500 brochures and images of Ford models sold in Australia from 1925 available for visitors to peruse.

The Ford Heritage Vault is the online repository for all things Ford from around the world, including Australia.

The Vault currently contains over 19,000 digital items, including product brochures, assorted regional issues of the Ford Times magazine, product and concept photography, images of global Ford facilities, and press releases detailing the innovations in historic concept vehicles.

“This is a significant milestone for the Ford Australia team, our dealers and Ford fans around the country,” said Andrew Birkic, President and CEO, Ford Australia and New Zealand.

“Just about every family in Australia has a Ford story and we love how Ford vehicles are such a part of the cultural landscape of the country,” he said.

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