HISTORIC BATTLE
Yanks try to steal Aussie motoring history
A NUMBER of high-profile past and present Ford Australia employees are fighting head office over plans to move the company’s extensive archive to the US.
If Ford HQ in Dearborn has its way, the archive, which dates back 90 years to when the company first started operating in Australia, will be moved to a centralised site within the Henry Ford Museum, along with national archives from Germany and the UK.
Ford Australia has started preparing the archive to be shipped, and Wheels understands a representative from the US is currently here to help prepare the material for export.
Ford told us it plans to move the archive “by the end of the year”.
However, a group of prominent personnel have banded together to stop the move.
Peter Fry, a former Ford Australia product planner who worked for the company for 36 years, said moving the archive would be a tragedy, and would seriously hamper efforts by local historians and journalists to research Ford’s rich history in Australia.
“It is all very well for the US to put the archives up online, it may all be digitised, but we are talking about a shipping container load of stuff, or more, and there is no way that is going to be digitised in a short timeframe,” Fry told Wheels. “So we believe it is essential the archive stay here.”
Past and present Ford Australia executives David Ford, Ian Vaughan and Noel Miller support Fry.
“It has simmered away for 12 months,” Fry told us. “We have tried to approach the company to get them to do the right thing, and they don’t seem to be very interested. We will be doing everything necessary to try and stop them.”
In the meantime, a series of significant bureaucratic loops could halt Ford Australia’s plan.
The Department of Communications and the Arts is responsible for enforcing the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage (PMCH) Act 1987. The Act requires a permit to export any items classified as Australian Protected Objects (APOS).
Kevin Molloy, manager of the manuscripts collection at the State Library of Victoria, said the Ford Australia archive should be protected by the PMCH Act.
“It is a significant cultural asset … it is important for the archive to stay in Australia,” he said. “Imagine if the Coles Myer archive was moved out of Australia; that is a significant collection, and I imagine the Ford collection is going to be equally as important as a collection that defines 20th-century Australia, 20th-century mobility and the whole automotive industry.”
A spokesperson for the Department told Wheels it could not make a judgement of whether the Ford Australia archive was classified as an APO since no application for an export permit has been submitted.
If an APO is exported without a permit, the government has the power to seize the material.
A Ford Australia spokesman said the company “will follow all regulatory requirements, as we always do”. He said Ford will apply for an export permit once its review of the archive material (expected to take until at least November) has been completed.
“We will be doing everything necessary to try and stop them” – Peter Fry, former Ford Australia product planner