True Blue – 75 Years of Ford in Australia - Hardback
Bill Tuckey (2000 First Edition) Free
tracked postage to anywhere in Australia. $46
On July 1, 1928, the first locally produced Model
T emerged from the Ford factory in Gheringhap Street Geelong ready to drive
Australia int a new industrial future. Long before local assembly began. Fords
had brought dramatically improved mobility to Australians. . In the very early
years of the century the Model T (“Tin Lizzies”) began changing the possibilities
of life. Before Lizzie’s arrival few people ever travelled further than 20
miles from their birthplace.
In 1999 an international panel of judges chose the
vehicles which put our wheels to be the Car of the 20th Century how
could the T not have won?
In its first 75 years the Ford Motor Company of
Australia has played a major role in our industrial, social, and cultural
history both in peace and war; the Ford blue oval is patterned into our
national patina, our way of live. In the 1930s V8-powered Fords seemed to
shrink the distances between far-flung Australian centres.
AUTHOR: BILL TUCKEY is one of
Australia’s most prominent motoring writers. He was editor of Wheels magazine
through the 1960s when he create the famous Car of the Year award the world’s
longest running such trophy. He hosted Australia’s first regular
television motoring show in 1967-69, and
foe four years in the late1980s had his own breakfast and drivetimes current
affairs talk shows on
Melbourne radio.
VALE BILL TUCKEY On 9th May 2016
Bill Tuckey, one of Australia’s most
well-known and well-loved motoring writers, has passed away, aged 80
Leading Australian motoring
journalist, editor, author and broadcaster, Bill Tuckey – possibly the most
prolific wordsmith in the automotive field in this country – has died at the
age of 80 after a long battle with illness.
Bill (we
can’t bring ourselves to call him Mr Tuckey) first rose to prominence as a
motoring writer as the motoring editor of Brisbane’s Courier Mail newspaper
before he was recruited as editor of Wheels magazine in 1963,
joining one of the most illustrious alumni of car magazine editors Australia
has ever produced. His predecessor, Ian Fraser, and those who subsequently
occupied the Wheels editor’s chair went on to forge
international careers in car magazines and the groundwork laid down by Bill
during his time as editor would underwrite the editorial tone of the careers of
those others who followed him. In an era when cars were really quite poor and
undeserving of the praise they received in some quarters, Bill developed a
say-it-as-it-is ethos with the staff of the magazine, which saw him pioneer
forthright opinions and multi-car comparison tests.
A desire
to applaud those manufacturers who were raising the standards of the cars being
offered in Australian car showrooms – and a prod to others to better things –
led to his creation of the Wheels Car of the Year award; at
the time the only such award anywhere in the world and now much copied. While
editing and writing for the publication, Bill found time to invent Romsey
Quints, a fictitious larger-than-life Colonel Blimp style character who
parodied with comedy and satire the world of motorists and motoring enthusiasts
and their relationships with their cars and their women-folk (it was a
different time). Romsey Quints wore a deer-stalker hat, carried a British
bureaucrat’s folded umbrella and was always photographed from behind to avoid
giving Tuckey’s identity away – which was satire in itself because everyone
knew it was Tuckey. In addition to his columns, Quints took on multiple
features assignments driving street sweepers, armoured personnel carriers,
large lorries and wrote them up as road tests with entertaining humour.
Readers
loved it. His publishers, K.G. Murray, even printed a collection of Romsey
Quints columns and stories in a special edition which was sold on the
newsstands alongside Wheels .Bill had only been at Wheels a
year when his other great passion, book writing, saw K.G. Murray publish
his Book of Australian Motor Racing. He was 28. Ever the budding
entrepreneur looking for an opportunity, he hosted Australia’s first motoring
show on Australian television in 1967.
Bill also
wrote a monthly column in Wheels in which, at one point, he
developed a verbal battle with motoring writer Paul Higgins who was writing
the Our Man Higgins column in rival Motor Manual magazine.
The duel of words and insults captured the attention of thousands each month
who followed the battle gleefully as the two used their unchallenged skills to
wield the English language as an acerbic weapon against each other Insults flew
back and forth month-by-month until the powers that be thought
enough-was-enough after Tuckey wrote that Higgins (who had significantly
protruding front teeth) was “the only man I know who can eat a cob of
corn through a cyclone wire fence”.
Bill
remained editor of Wheels until 1968 when he left to be a
freelance writer and, coincidentally, to get drives in the Bathurst 500 at
Mount Panorama.He drove at Bathurst three times and, indeed, introduced touring
car champion Allan Grice to Bathurst as co-driver in a stock-standard Fiat 124
Sport. Several years later Bill was driving a Holden Monaro GTS 327, which he
thought was his best shot at a Bathurst victory but, having qualified 13th, it
retired with engine trouble. He raced touring cars for 10 years.
His times
behind the wheel at Mount Panorama (and other touring car events) would expose
him to first-hand experience of what it was like the drive in the great race
and this led to more books about motor racing in Australia in general and about
Bathurst in particular. In company with his contemporaries at car launches and
over convivial dinners, Bill was always talking about “The Book” he had under
way which was not surprising because, at last count, he had written as many as
26 books most of which resulted from a relationship with Ray Berghouse and Tom
Floyd who published his constant flow of manuscripts under the imprint of
Berghouse, Floyd, Tuckey and later Chevron publishing.
Bill then
took a fork in the road and he and his wife Marcia open a sandwich bar in
Neutral Bay before dabbling in event promotions by bringing the
French Hell Drivers to Australia. In 1974, a year after Wheels was
one of a basket of K.G. Murray magazines sold across to Australian Consolidated
Press in 1973, Bill returned to Wheels for a further four
years as head of the men’s titles – which included ACP’s stable of car
magazines.
He then
wrote two films for TV and cinema on the 1979 Repco Trial and in 1981 became a
founding columnist for Robert Gottliebsen’s Business Review Weekly magazine.
Bill’s weekly columns were followed closely by senior car industry executives
because of the influence his opinions carried with the leaders of Australian
industry and commerce who were buying the title in their many tens of thousands
a week. Bill’s most controversial book was The Rise and Fall of Peter
Brock, which detailed Brock’s stellar rise as a virtual Holden nameplate
and the terrible fall when Brock allowed his belief in voodoo car technology to
come between him and Holden management. Bill nailed the inside story.
Never
lost for words, Bill joined Melbourne radio station 3AW and spent five years
with his own breakfast and drive current affairs radio programs. Around this
time Bill joined Holden’s advertising agency, George Patterson, because
the agency thought his vast experience, knowledge of cars and knowledge of
motor racing would bring perspective to their group which was running the
Holden racing program independently of GMH to get around a worldwide ban on
motor racing by GM at the time.
He was
also called on by Fairfax to take over the helm of the former Motor
Manual magazine which had been relaunched as Car Australia.
After initial stellar success under editor Tim Britten, when in some months it
outsold Wheels magazine, ACP (following a well-used Kerry
Packer tactic) poached Tim Britten for ACP’s Street Machine. Car
Australia then lost its way under a succession of editors. The decline
had set in by the time Bill took on the role and he could not save it.
Bill was
commissioned by Ford Australia to write the definitive book about the Blue
Oval’s local history and in 2000, True Blue: 75 Years of Ford in
Australia was released. Bill was good company and a great raconteur.
He had an enormous ego and over a glass of wine or three would regale his
fellow motoring writers about his exploits.
But,
unlike many, Bill had accumulated a host of achievements, written hundreds of
thousands of words that mattered to his many readers and was on first name
terms here and overseas with anyone who had ever counted in the car industry;
and in motor racing. Over his career, in terms of what he wrote, in terms of
his example to other motoring writers and in terms of what he told car industry
leaders when they asked for his opinion, Bill has made a difference to the cars
we have driven in the intervening years. These many achievements justified his
confidence in himself. Marcia, son Stuart and daughter Elisabeth have every
right to be proud of him.
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