Some people are passionate about golf, others about football or fishing.Then there are those who just love cars.This book is as much about people as it is about the cars they own: some rare, some unusual, some amazingly original.
All these people have one thing in common: they own a part of automotive history, cars from a bygone era, and they are passionate about them, spending years in some cases looking for original parts to restore them. These people are not just passionate, they are often purists, hell-bent on returning what often starts out as a pile of junk into the fascinating, early example of the classical automobile it once was.
This book is a collection of articles first published in The Age.The car owners were not chosen solely because of the car they own or because of how long they might have owned it.They were chosen for the stories they have to tell and the fascination they hold for their cars.There is the woman who in later life wants to buy an MG, but has to find a 1969 MGB Mk II, the car she had as a 21-year-old. In her search she unwittingly stumbles upon the car of her youth, the exact one she had owned 30 years before. Then there’s the Richmond man who rebuilds his home just so that he can keep his beloved 1929 Hudson Landau inside the house; the South Melbourne man so smitten with the Citroen Goddess of the 1970s that he keeps a scrapbook of every one he sees advertised; the blind Bendigo mechanic who restores cars in the dark; and the fruit grower who rebuilt the wreck of a TT Ford truck, bought new by his grandfather in 1927.
These glimpses into the lives of car afficionados not only offer an interesting slice of automobile history, but they also provide a colourful cross-section of Australians, both past and present.
