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Ford Australia’s entire collection of nearly 100 years of historic documents – including brochures, photographs, car design and engineering information – could disappear from boxes in a Melbourne warehouse unless permission is granted to send the material in an air-conditioned Detroit time capsule.
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A warehouse full of important historical documents from Ford Australia spanning almost 100 years could end up in a warehouse in Melbourne – instead of being digitized and preserved in a special air-conditioned time capsule inside the global archive headquarters of Ford – due to a law that prohibits articles of historical importance from being sent offshore.
Although Australian Government regulations prohibit the export of important historical documents due to their cultural significance, there is no legal requirement for the materials to be preserved locally by the company that holds them, in this case Ford .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 It is understood the situation has led to a stand-off between Ford and local regulators.
The auto giant wants to preserve Australia’s historic materials within its centralized archive center in the US – because it says the cost of digitizing the vast collection locally is too expensive.
Although it has kept its archives intact since the closure of local manufacturing that ran from 1925 to 2016 – now stored in a facility near its former car assembly line in Broadmeadows in Melbourne’s northern suburbs – the Ford Australia is under no legal obligation to continue to preserve its historic materials.
Instead, Ford wants to send the thousands of documents, pamphlets and photographs to its global archives headquarters in Detroit, where the original versions of the important materials will be preserved in an air-conditioned capsule of hours, and scan to create digital copies to be shared with researchers, government departments and car enthusiasts around the world.
The stand-off means thousands of important documents – from the original Ford factory in Geelong in 1925 to the final build of the Ford Falcon in Broadmeadows in 2016 – could be left to rot in a warehouse on Melbourne’s northern outskirts instead of sending. at Ford’s US global archive headquarters.
The global Ford archives center in Detroit – in the basement of the company’s headquarters – currently holds more than 3.5 million photos and brochures and more than 10,000 hours of video footage of every model Ford produced in North America.
Now the company wants to bring home its global archives, including those from the UK, Europe, South America, South Africa and Australia.
The global Ford archives center in Detroit stores material on 5km worth of shelving within a huge air-conditioned facility that reduces humidity, to extend the life of the original printed materials.
So far, Ford has scanned 10 percent of the library’s materials to share them online – however over time, the company plans to create digital copies of its entire archive from every region around the world .
Ford Australia’s historical collection remains an outlier due to the ban on exporting 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 worldwide, Ted Ryan, said. Drive:
“If ever somebody approached us about being creative, we can be creative, and we can find out a way to preserve the materials (from Australia) because right now it is split between three different (areas) and I don’t think anyone’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 preserve and scan historical materials” inside of its headquarters in Detroit.
Mr Ryan said the ban on the export of historical documents was unique to Australia and the automotive industry.
“This is the only thing I’ve seen and it’s unique in the automotive industry, because I’ve been with Coca-Cola for 21 years and I’ve had a lot of materials sent from Australia to Coca-Cola and vice versa,” he said.
While industry experts are divided over whether Ford Australia’s documents should remain in Australia and risk destruction over time – or be sent to the US to be digitized and shared more widely – the global archive expert of Ford says:
“We’re always willing to partner and be innovative in any way we can. We want to see this material preserved wherever it is, whether it’s in the US or Australia. We have duplicates of some (materials) here in the form of brochures and product photography, but we don’t have a complete Ford Australia collection and that needs to be maintained.”
The Ford Heritage Vault online portal opened in June 2022, primarily starting with US-based models.
The website was very popular, with over 400,000 downloads in the first two weeks. It has since stabilized at around 4000 downloads a day.
The website includes pamphlets dating back 70 years. There are also some rare never-before-seen photos of design studies of styling themes that never made it to showrooms.
From the 1950s to the early 2000s the styling studio took photos of the clay models they worked on every day. There are 80,000 images of these design studies alone.
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