Just as I laud the amount of carbon burning morsels of automotive heaven I have to applaud this doco. Our guilt is there for all to see yet we all act like ostriches and carry on regardless.

Melbourne Metal

A move to Melbourne is definitely recommended for anyone who is into a bit of retro automania.

Dotted on nearly every street, you will find a piece of automotive history that will have you fixated, bringing back nostalgic memories of times past.

Whether it's 50's, 60's, 70' or 80's that's your thing, Melbourne can accommodate. Big block Yankee and Aussie rides abound. You soon grow an appreciation of the local rides as well though the amount of 4.0 litre + barges still astounds me. No wonder Aussies are the biggest polluters by capita ...anywhere.

The massive wave of Italian immigration after WWII brought with it a desire for cars from home so there's some spanking Alfas and Fiats around. But of course every one of the new immigrants marked their prosperity with a Merc and man oh man, are there plenty of them on show. From 50's 220S Cabriolets to massive LWB W116's and sublime W123 CE's, there's loads about.

And for this new lad from England who watched on as 70's & 80's Japanese metal withered away and all but disappeared on Britain's roads (damn salt) with no appreciation of their asthetics until years later, Melbourne is, while maybe not up there with downtown Tokyo, it does a good job. Not in modded examples, simply the sheer amount of unfettled metal ready to be played with. Often one owner from new. 'Rolla's and the like, cars I once never even gave a second glance, are now greeted with a grin. Like when you meet a corker of a girl in a bar and discover within two minutes that she was the exceedingly plain girl at school who never got a look in with anyone.

If you like the picture above, located here...

http://s1124.photobucket.com/albums/l569/david_barrett1/

...are a few albums of the retro metal found here in Melbourne.

For pistonheads and appreciators of modish automotive art

Ordningarily I wouldn't care

I read a while back that the white plastic garden chair is quite possibly the world's most popular product. Think about it, they are everywhere. They are more than likely in your back yard, outside bars and cafes on your holiday, lined up at weddings and graduations, there whenever you go to the tip, up alleyways and down creeks and always in the rubble of some war ravaged town on the news.
But I put it to you that something else will soon take the humble placcy chair's mantel as the world's No.1 product.
Unfortunately it is not the Mercedes W123, which for longevity and popularity provide a good case especially from a biased fan like me who sees the Beirut taxi everywhere. But I'd have to concede there certainly is not the numbers to justify its position anywhere near the top.
So what is it?
Well it is about 6 inches high, cylindrical and full of holes and we have a certain Swedish chain to thank for it. You might know it as the ORDNING, but I bet for most it is simply the cutlery drainer you notice everywhere but you don't notice at all ...if you know what I mean.
I bet a while back, lets say 6 months after your local IKEA rolled into town, each time you went to a friends house who like you had made the obligatory outing to the store to see what all the fuss was about, you would say to yourself, 'oh look I've got one of them'.
In some weird darkened corner of my brain though, I feel like I'm being followed. They are like sentries standing guard, keeping an eye on me wherever I go from my own kitchen to every single cafe I seem to enter whether greasy spoon (in London) to overpriced gourmet (18 Aussie dollars for poached eggs and a bit of beetroot in Melbourne...pah), friends, restaurants, office kitchens, homeless shelters, student digs and nursing homes are to name but a few of the locations where they have tracked me down. And it seems every single set designer has an award card, if there is such a thing, for IKEA. I can't turn on the tv without noticing one somewhere.
If they could talk they would sound like the triple eyed aliens off Toy Story, only more sinister as there would also be a Darth Vader like rasp to it.

The first thing that strikes you down here is obviously the dedication to Holden and Ford and in particular their V6 and V8 offerings. There's the odd Fiesta and a few Focus running about and you might even catch a Kia built Festiva, pure yuk but didn't we go through the 80's and a good part of the 90's in the belief that we were the cause of every other Aussie contracting skin cancer? A blinkin great hole in the ozone sitting over Oceania and "Slip Slop Slap" were common knowledge even in the playgrounds of 80's Blightly. Well it seems they couldn't give a damn themselves. V8's are continuing to sell well even though a litre of fuel will cost the Aussie driver a mighty A$1.40. That's about 90p to you and me but boy do they not like it.

A pint of beer, well, lager, will cost you nine bux, a punnet of peaches nearly a fiver...in bux and don't get me going on a loaf of bread. But you hardly hear a murmur of discontent. Yet there's tshs and tuttings at garage forecourts from Dandenong to Darwin, so much so that you'd be forgiven for thinking a swarm of locusts had taken up residence. You can't help but look on incredulously as the dollars rack up to well over the 100 dollar mark when shiny chrome V8 badges adorn every panel on these monsters. And lets get one thing straight, they aren't the drives of executives but the everyday run arounds of the ordinary working man ...or woman, as is often the case. It's like Peter Andre declaring he really loves his kids. Well, like a certain Mr Charlie Brooker exclaimed, "You're supposed to love your bloody kids", you can't help but feel the need to shout .."They're bloody supposed to be thirsty and expensive to fill". Given many of the drivers are six foot plus and built like the proverbial brick shit house, and that's just the women, I choose to keep quiet though?

We can of course blame WWII for the deep rooted fascination with the big block. It was to mark the end of Australia's days looking to the motherland for its cultural and auto references, though you can still find a fair smattering of the BBC's finest on the free to air channels ...and Corrie. No doubt the good old boys brought back tales from their fellow former subjects of the British Empire of what they were going to do when they got home. So as the GI's demobbed and took to the streets and saltflats in their modified 30's Fords to have some fun hot rodding, the Aussie lads realised that what their Yankee counterparts had told them about the motors they used back home, would be much more suitable to conditions at in Australia. It took a while but Austins and Morris's, then BMC's and BL's sales waned as locally produced Holdens and Fords engine output grew and chassis engineering took into account local conditions. The greatest failing of the British motor industry after the war was not taking advantage of its position to maximise its sales through designing cars for anything other than British roads. Unfortunately, they simply fell apart on the Savannah and in the Outback.

Wandering around Melbourne either on foot or by car, you can't help but be amazed at the condition of many an older motor. No salt being the key I'm told. If of course something old is of interest. But it's when you get close up that you begin to wonder why the northern hemisphere even bothered with that self loathing for putting the Aussies through the spectre of a bad case of melanoma. For even a Mk5 Cortina would have a four litre unit at least lurking under the bonnet. Now I'm not sure if you had the pleasure of a ride in one of these back in the day but I certainly did. Goalkeeping for a local under-13 side in Southampton meant a weekly journey, about eight up in a Mk5 estate (say that here about their stationwagon and they think you're slagging it off) back and forward to training. Can you imagine that now? Well the manager who was indeed just like the one from Murphy's Mob, sheepskin overcoat, tracksuit bottoms and football boots on the touchline, took great joy in slamming us from side to side on the journey home around every corner. He had some encouragement admittedly but man oh man did that motor like to kick its tale out. The Cortina wasn't exactly endowed with the handling of a Lotus, earlier incarnations maybe but not a two litre GL so can you imagine a four+ litre. It doesn't bare thinking about. I wonder how its baring up re its thirst nowadays.

Just over a week to go before the big departure down under. Well at least the weather will be better than what's coming London's way this winter.

I'm looking forward to some Aussie 'exotica', maybe a Holden ute or two, that Leyland barge from the 70's and of course one of those cherished XB Falcons.

The rebadged GM powerhouses from Oz that Vauxhall market in the UK whets the appetite for a bit of American inspired beef (RIP Pontiac by the way). That Monaro was a bit of a guilty pleasure and the sheer grunt of a Vauxhall VXR8 is what makes it that bit more exciting than an M5 .... did I just say that?

Time to consider my drive down under as well of course, though I have been looking at ebay.com.au for a few months now, just to get an idea you understand. Mrs B. insists she's getting herself a new Focus but it's got to be old timer for me and given I'm not one for too much change (moving the other side of the world is enough for now methinks), the old MB W123 CE still holds dear. That or an original Saab 900, convertible please.

last cars to go on

Here's a little film of the last cars to go on and an explanation as to what I am trying to achieve with this piece.

CarProject2

The installation looks at all our relationships with the automobile, from the good to the bad. It is a celebration of everything the car has brought us from the freedom of the open road to the beauty in design but also asks us to consider the impact automobiles have had from the frustration of congestion to, depending on your standpoint, the wars fought over oil and lives lost to bring us the freedom to get from A to B in the easiest and most comfortable manner.

The piece consists of 1500+ diecast models of varying vintage collected over the past year and added to my childhood collection, one acrylic globe of 1.40m diameter, one 45 gallon oil drum and ten litres of used oil.

The oil drains then drips over the course of the day 'into' the drum, forming a pond on one end which drops into a hidden compartment to be taken out and refilled at the beginning of each day.

I hope for the piece to conjure up all sorts of images and interpretations as well as engender plenty of reminiscing as viewers point out toys they once played with or cars they or their fathers owned

Getting there.....

So now you can see the piece in full....well nearly. A square of sand at the base and ten litres of oil to flow from the base of the globe into a pond formed on the drum and it's ready to show.