| About the last place you'd expect to find a car collection is in a theme park ... built around ginger. The Ginger Factory on Queensland's Sunshine Coast has taken this root, used extensively in Asian cooking, and turned it into a multi-million dollar business.
Situated at Yandina, the Ginger Factory boasts Gingertown and in this mythical village there's a 1930's style garage.
It's here the modest collection of five or six vehicles is housed, along with a huge array of models cars and motoring memorabilia, all for sale of course. The cars are privately owned and on loan to the business as a changing display, much like the system used at Launceston's National Automobile Museum of Tasmania.
On our visit the Ginger Factory museum contained a 1926 Chevrolet, 1929 Essex, 1929 Chrysler sedan, 1934 Terraplane and a wonderful 1939 Chrysler Red Back Special racer.
What caught our eye was the 1929 Essex Super Six roadster, resplendent in burnt orange with contrasting black mudguards and a white rag top.
The car came originally from the south coast of New South Wales and was bought at auction in partly restored condition. Interestingly, two of the cars in the collection are closely related: The Essex and the Terraplane.
Both were names used by the parent Hudson company, formed in 1909, with the Hudson name coming from Joseph L. Hudson, a department store owner who gave not only his name to the venture, but also the seed capital to get the wheels rolling. Hudson started with low priced cars aimed at getting some of the buyers attracted to Henry Ford's Model T, launched in 1908.
Hudson were an innovative company (unlike Ford at that time) and developed dual brakes, dash board oil pressure and generator warning lights, and the first balanced crankshaft in its Hudson straight-six engine. This engine was called the Super Six, so the badge on the Essex has quite a story to tell. The balanced crankshaft allowed the engine to rev higher without becoming lumpy and it developed more power for its size than lower revving engines.
Smooth was the word.
Hudson stuck with the straight six until 1957, although it did develop other engines. Hudson started the Essex line of models in 1919, as a budget brand, still up against the ubiquitous Model T and the emerging Chevrolet. By now Hudson was placed as a more up market model. The key to Essex success was affordability, and the car thrived.
It was at its peak in 1929 when our featured car was built and that year 300,000 Hudsons and Essex cars were manufactured. But the Essex name had just about run its course. Hudson needed a more dynamic model name to develop sales. It trod softly at first and released the `Essex' Terraplane in July 1932.
At the launch was famous aviatrix Amelia Earhart, who later lost her life when her aircraft crashed on a flight in the south Pacific. The Terraplane name is an offshoot of well known descriptive terms.
An aeroplane flies, if you aquaplane you skim over water and the Terraplane ran smoothly over roads. The Essex name lasted just a year until 1933 when the Terraplane mantle stood on its own and Essex, was sent to the great garage in the sky, or in this case, a small, but interesting, garage on Australia's Sunshine Coast.
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