The history of Ford's Geelong factory

It’s a bit hard to imagine now, but back in the very early days of Australian motoring, the Ford brand was represented by a fairly rag-tag group of dealers and importers attempting to sell against each other. 

Eventually, a hierarchy started to develop and as we became more reliant on Canadian-built Ford product (it was right-hand drive and part of the Empire) head office in Detroit started to look at the Australian operation.

It began to look even harder when, the Australian government started applying tariffs to protect local industry. Those tariffs meant fully-imported cars (and many other imports) cost more to land here. 

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In typical Henry Ford style, the company worked out that if it brought Ford cars into Australia as kits and assembled them here with local labour, the end product could be sold for a lower, more competitive price. 

With that decision made around 1923 or 1924, Ford’s main criteria for the location of this new assembly plant were that the facility had to be in or near a decent-sized town with a good supply of labour, and it had to have a deep-water port for getting the kits into the country by ship. 

As luck would have it, Australia’s fourth-largest city at that time, Geelong, situated on Corio Bay, had both those things.

Within a couple of years, it was sort of up and running and, on July 1, 1925, the very first Australian-assembled Model T rolled off the end of the fairly primitive, 12-metre long Geelong assembly line housed in a rented wool-store on the edge of the city centre.

The Geelong plant under construction in October 1925.

But better was to come as part of the grand plan with 40 hectares of land owned by the Geelong Harbour Trust and already home to a pub and (another) old wool-store, purchased and turned into what would become the assembly, stamping and casting plant before 1925 was out. 

This is the charming, red-brick building that still stands in the outer Geelong suburb of Norlane and is known simply as the Ford Geelong Plant.

Eventually, Ford decided that building all the cars in Geelong and shipping them around the country was not the way to do things. So, within that first 18 months of local assembly it had established assembly plants in Queensland (Eagle Farm) Sydney (Homebush) Tasmania (Hobart) SA (Port Adelaide) and WA (Fremantle). 

During WWII, Ford built military vehicles at Geelong.

All were open before the end of 1926 which was an amazing achievement. But it remains that the Geelong plant was Ford’s original assembly plant in this country.

Eventually, of course, Ford Australia moved from being an assembler of cars to an outright manufacturer, at which point smaller, old-style plants like Geelong just couldn’t cope with the new processes or the volumes imagined. 

That’s why, in the late 1950s, Ford acquired 180 hectares of land at Broadmeadows on Melbourne’s northern fringe and set about building its new head office and manufacturing plant.

Ford's head office in Broadmeadows 1969.

With the new plant in full swing for the first locally-made Falcon of 1960, the job of building six-cylinder and V8 engines for our Fords fell to the existing Geelong Plant, with the red-brick redesigned to cast and machine the engines destined for Australian-made-and-assembled Falcons, Fairlanes, Cortinas, LTDs, Territories and even F100 pick-ups.

Although local engine production was slated to close in 2008, the decision was ultimately made to continue the six-cylinder engine right up to the end of Ford production in this country, an event that occurred on October 7, 2016.

The Last Ford Falcon Sedan.

In May, 2019, it was finally announced that something was happening to the Geelong Plant which had more or less sat idle since the production shutdown. 

It emerged that developer Pelligra Group would purchase the Broadmeadows and Geelong sites and redevelop them as manufacturing and technology hubs.

Pelligra had reportedly earmarked $500 million for the redevelopment on top of an undisclosed (although rumoured to be more than $75 million) sum for the purchase. 

Pelligra is also the outfit that picked up Holden’s Elizabeth plant outside Adelaide two years earlier, with similar plans for a manufacturing and tech hub.

But as this is being written, information on the scale of the redevelopment process is a bit hard to find. 

Aerial view of the Broadmeadows site with Plant 1, Plant 2 and Paint facility.

We approached Pelligra for a comment, but no response was forthcoming on either that or the state of the all-important tenant situation.

What we can tell you is that the old Ford factory seems to be continuing its tradition of looking after the citizens of Geelong. 

As part of the Victorian government’s Covid response, the old Ford factory became a mass vaccination hub. A fitting role, perhaps, for such an important part of the history of Ford in Australia and an institution so closely linked with the local community.

But here’s the other piece of evidence that Ford and Geelong will forever be linked. In 1925, Ford agreed to sponsor the Geelong Cats AFL (then the VFL) football club. 

That sponsorship continues to this day and is allegedly the longest continuous sporting team sponsorship in the world. 

And just to prove the merit of the association, in that same year (1925) Geelong won its first premiership, beating Collingwood by 10 points in front of a 64,000-strong MCG audience.