In 1987, I was on a hunting trip near my hometown of Corryong in NE Victoria, when I discovered this vehicle among an eclectic mix of wrecks in varying degrees of decay and vandalism on an old farm. She looked forlorn but unscathed, except for missing rear window, all rubber seals, no floor, rust throughout, a completely concave roof  (which I was later told this was from carting hay bales), smashed in RH mudguard (came off second best in a collision with a Black Angus Bull), all the windows were down and the seats were growing things local to the area, and this all fertilized and cared for by a prodigious colony of rats. I approached the owner, a laconic Yugoslav named Bish who said “Take it, it’s been there for 25 years, I don’t want it…first the motor she bugger up, then the gear box it buggered. I fix the bloody gear box then the diff it buggers up, I fix the bloody diff then the bloody crank shaft it busts, no mate you can have the bugger for all I care.” I borrowed a car trailer and took the old thing to my uncle’s where it sat in the corner of the machinery shed for the next 14years.

1998 - enter Kevin Hickling, classic car show Burwood, Sydney, driving up the long avenue of trees to the central park at the wheel of a magnificent white 1937 Hudson 8 Deluxe. It was the first time I had ever seen a ‘live’ one. He was a very busy man, but somehow I convinced him to help me restore my car, and in 2001 I trailered it to Taree where he went over it from stem to stern, inside to outside and gave me an encyclopaedia’s worth of advice. This translated into five years of hard work and a million phone calls. The result of patience and optimism and a love of Hudson’s have put one more survivor on the road.