√Fight for Ford Australia historical archives goes international

The entire collection of almost 100 years of Ford Australia’s historical documents – including brochures, photographs, car designs and engineering information – could perish in boxes in a Melbourne warehouse unless permission is granted to ship the material to an air-conditioned time capsule in Detroit.

A warehouse full of precious historical documents from Ford Australia that span almost 100 years could perish in a Melbourne warehouse – rather than be digitised and preserved in a special air-conditioned time capsule inside Ford’s global archive headquarters – due to a law that prohibits articles of historical significance being sent offshore.

While Australian Government regulations ban the export of important historical documents due to their cultural significance, there is no legal requirement for the materials to be preserved locally by the company that holds them, in this case Ford.

Drive understands the situation has led to a stand-off between Ford and local regulators.

The auto giant wants to preserve Australian historical materials inside its centralised archives centre in the US – because it claims the cost to digitise the vast collection locally is prohibitively expensive.

Although it has kept its archives intact since the shutdown of local manufacturing that spanned from 1925 to 2016 – now stored in a facility near its former car assembly line in Broadmeadows on the northern outskirts of Melbourne – Ford Australia says there is no legal obligation to continue to preserve its historical materials.

Instead, Ford wants to ship the thousands of documents, brochures and photographs to its global archives headquarters in Detroit, where original versions of the precious materials would be preserved in an air-conditioned time capsule, as well as scanned to create digital copies to be shared with researchers, government departments and car enthusiasts around the world.

The stand-off means thousands of precious documents – dating back to the original Ford factory in Geelong in 1925 and up to the last Ford Falcon build in Broadmeadows in 2016 – could be left to rot in a warehouse on Melbourne’s northern outskirts rather than be shipped to Ford’s US global archive headquarters.

The global Ford archives centre in Detroit – in the basement of company headquarters – currently has more 3.5 million photos and brochures and more than 10,000 hours of video footage of every model Ford has ever produced in North America. Now the company wants to bring its global archives home, including those from the UK, Europe, South America, South Africa and Australia.

The global Ford archives centre in Detroit stores material on 5km worth of shelving inside a giant air-conditioned facility that reduces humidity, to extend the life of original printed materials.

So far, Ford has scanned 10 per cent of the library’s materials so they can be shared online – however over time the company plans to create digital copies of its entire archives from every region around the world.

Ford Australia’s historical collection remains an outlier because of the ban on the export of documents of “historical significance”.

When asked if Ford USA was working with Australian regulators to seek permission to preserve the documents from Down Under, the archives and heritage manager for Ford globally, Ted Ryan, told Drive:

“If somebody ever approached us about being creative, we can be creative, and we can figure out a way to preserve the materials (from Australia) because right now it’s split between three different (areas) and I don’t think anybody’s winning.”

Ford’s global archives manager said the company has “a purpose built space to keep material forever” and “a mechanism set up here to be able to preserve and scan historic materials” inside its headquarters in Detroit.

Mr Ryan said the ban on the export of historical documents was unique to Australia and the automotive industry.

“It’s the only one I’ve come across and it’s unique to the auto industry, because I was a Coca-Cola for 21 years and I had plenty of materials shipped from Australia to Coca-Cola and vice versa,” he said.

While industry experts are divided over whether the Ford Australia documents should stay in Australia and risk perishing over time – or be sent to the US to be digitised and shared more widely – Ford’s global archives expert said:

“We’re always willing to partner and be innovative in any way that we can. We want to see this material preserved regardless of where it is, whether it’s in the US or Australia. We do have duplicates of some (materials) here already in the form of brochures and product photography, but we don’t have the complete Ford Australia collection and that needs to be preserved.”

The Ford Heritage Vault online portal opened in June 2022, starting primarily with US-based models.

The website proved so popular, there were more than 400,000 downloads in the first two weeks. It has since settled to about 4000 downloads a day.

The website includes brochures dating back 70 years. There are also some rare never before seen images of design studies of styling themes that didn’t make it to showrooms.

From the 1950s to the early 2000s the styling studio took photos of the clay models they were working on every day. There are 80,000 images of these design studies alone.

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