Feature: Swap Meets

Rumble in the Jumble

Let's say that, through some unforeseen circumstance, you find yourself suddenly in wanting of a 1928 Studebaker valve cover. Or a set of con-rods for a Rolls-Royce Meteor V12 tank engine. King-pins for a pre-war Pontiac. Levers for a Jaguar Mark IV under-dash air-conditioning unit. Or badges for a Triumph Dolomite. Whither shall one go?

"eBay!" comes the chorus. But back before 'visiting' meant staying indoors with a computer, and to many families and fans of quirky car-brands still, the place to go for an injection of old-car junk is the swap meet.

Swap meets are like car-boot sales where you can buy anything including, literally, a car boot. A great opportunity for like-minded windbags to drool over little-known chrome - and for normal people to pocket a few shekels out of grandpa's shed - swap meets are a long-standing tradition of classic and enthusiast car clubs, though they're sometimes independently organised by entrepreneurs and charities.

Once or twice each month on average, and almost every weekend during August, a suburban park or showground is blanketed with beaten-up vans, blue tarpaulins and trestle tables. Swappers are notoriously early starters, with many traders camping on-site to get the jump on the 5:00am set-up and 6:00am start. Outside the gate, punters will already be waiting with torches.

For a handful of hard-core swappers, the early starts, frozen fingers and long kilometres in a wallowing, retread-tyred 1978 HiLux aren't just a novel carny lifestyle; it's a livelihood.

"The vendors out there, you'll find that 50 percent of them come back year after year," says Colin Murphy, surveying the 350-odd stallholders gathered under the vast carport of the Fairfield City Showground, in Sydney's west. "They spend most of their time wandering from one swap meet to another, and it's a very welcome source of income."

Murphy is president of the Chrysler Restorers Club of Australia, organiser of one of Sydney's biggest annual swap meets, the Liverpool City Swap. Australia seems to have hitched to the bandwagon early, with Murphy pegging the CRCA's first swap meet "somewhere around 1976".

Australia's oldest, and the world's fourth-biggest swap meet, is the Bendigo National, but perhaps the best-known swap meet in the world is England's Beaulieu International Autojumble, held each September since its inception in 1976. An institution among the UK/Europe handlebar-moustache set, it reliably draws 2000 stallholders (reportedly paying more than $600 per stall) and more than 32,000 visitors to the grounds of Beaulieu Abbey and the famed National Motor Museum.

A somewhat newer, but just as oddly interesting event is the Imola Mostra Scambio in mid-September, wherein vendors flank the length of the famous formula One circuit.

These European events long ago transcended mere enthusiast swaps, having incorporated annual event themes and collector-car auctions to become, effectively, the European motor shows of classic-car crap.

It takes a cast-iron will, discipline and/or insomnia to be a swapper, as we discovered at the Liverpool Super Swap.

The showground parking lot hosts a normal community market most Saturdays. This particular Sunday's Chrysler theme was immediately defined by the mint R-series Valiant and careworn Chrysler Royal inside the gate, where punters paid a princely $3 for entry.

Polar fleece, parkas and dusty Blundstone boots were the fashion among the mainly middle-aged and older visitors wandering the matrix of stalls. Actually, 'stalls' overstates the point-of-sale display finese, with many shunning even a trestle table in favour of tarpaulins, plastic bakery trays or styrofoam fruit crates in rows on the ground.

To my left, boxes disgorged from a Japanese-import Delica spilled over with chrome-bodied, rectangular fog lights, the sort that instantly Europeanised one's TE Cortina. Directly opposite, a stall was doing good business with West Coast Choppers bandannas, skull patches and sparkly metallic iron-on T-shirt transfers.

While one part of me sneered at how the 1970s apparently never died (they just moved deeper into the suburbs), it was also great fun to spot hubcaps, exterior mirrors, tail-lamp lenses, door handles and bumpers and identify the once-popular cars they'd come from.

A couple of vendors had huge collections of old tools: tin-snips, files, augurs, chisels, anvils. Some were worn beyond use, and into the realm of storytelling. These tools, which strong and skilled hands used to make and repair things, are received by the next generation as nothing more than junk to be rid of.

A little farther along, a chrome bird clinging to a rusty wall of partitioning turned out to be a row of early Holden bonnets for sale. But some LE Monaro owner would have struck gold with the set of original honeycomb wheels, in reasonable condition, for $250 the lot.

I, meanwhile, was sidetracked by a couple of 1/43 models, a 1972 magazine I'd forgotten I wanted, and then by a mound of car badges that had evidently been shovelled out of the back seat of a Datsun 200B. I spent $3 on a Moke grille badge, bought for sentimental reasons, then a further $4 on a pair of Datsun 120Y badges, which will come in handy for some mischief I've yet to devise.

This being a Chrysler swap, we were bound to meet Xavier. The rake-thin, gap-toothed rockabilly spends much of the year on the road in his trusty VE Safari, filled with choice Valiant parts. Xavier, from rural Victoria, has a cousin in Sydney and girls in several towns. He gives me a bumper sticker that reads: "Another Valiant still going strong".

Spread over his tarp were a pair of Charger tail-lights ($70 the pair), a genuine Pacer hubcap ($120) and a Pacer gearknob ($15).

There's old stuff, then there's new-old stuff. Here and there, standing like beacons of authenticity, would be a table full of pale boxes bearing familiar, but faded logos.

Genuine Chrysler Parts. Smiths Instruments. Carter Carburettors. These are the boxed, new-old stock of which swapers - both buyers and sellers - truly dream.

One is wiry, cowboy-hatted Ron Hanna, a veteran of the Sydney swap scene. "My first swap meet was the David Jones car park, Parramatta in 1958," he grins. "Cost me five shillings in. I was selling FJ guards brand new for bloody 20 quid. Love to have them today. Triple manifolds for Ford Customlines, 10 quid each. Buick, Oakland, Pontiac king-pins, a quid."

Hanna got all his stock by door-knocking parts places and dealerships. "Couple of years ago, I was at a carby place," he says. "Bloke shows me upstairs; there's all these old cabinets. I'm having a coronary. Green and white Lucas boxes, all 1920s, '30s. Rotor buttons. Next drawer, brand-new distributor caps. Next cabinet, condensers. I sold a set of those points for a 1929 Indian motorcycle today."

Yeah, but just one set. Friend and fellow swap veteran, gentle Scotsman John Parker, was introduced to swaps in the 1970s. "My wages then, working as a mechanic, were $60 a week. I took $700 that weekend and I'm gone! This'll do me! After that I was on the hunt for stuff.

"In the '70s, mate, vintage stuff was everywhere - but you can hardly sell it now. Like vintage cars, who wnats them? The cars that young people now want are Toranas, Valiants, Falcons."

Parker buys whole boxes of new-old stock: Motorcraft spark plugs, Smiths gauges, Hella trailer lamps, gaskets and piston ring kits mainly at auctions, though canny vendors will also spot another vendor's bargain and buy it to on-sell later. Like many vendors, Parker lives on acreage. "My five-acre block's full from the top to the bottom. I've got 150, 200 pallets sitting outside full of stuff. Five sheds full."

The shrewd Scotsman has an eye for what'll sell. He picked up those Rolls-Royce con-rods at a government surplus auction, out-bidding scrap merchants to get 360 of them for $90. He took them to Bendigo and put them on the table at $35 a pair. Then $50 a pair. "It's the oddball stuff that they love."

With his truck absolutely surrounded with stuff, Parker's pricing policy is sometimes spontaneous. "Earlier today a bloke over there calls out, 'How much for these?' I yell, 'Fifteen!' The bloke goes, 'Will you take 40?' 'Ooh, okay, mate - but you drive a hard bargain ..." '

Around half the stalls at the Liverpool Super Swap, however, weren't the least bit classic or Chryslerish. Some flogged cheap, Chinese-made mini-bikes, others, cleaning products, cheap plastic toys, wooden wall carvings, little model motorcycles made out of wire.

CRCA vice-president Brian Kelleher, a retired Qantas pilot, points to this as the eBay effect.

"It's had a huge effect," he says. "All the so-called good parts will now go to eBay, because good parts, particularly new-old-stock stuff, are now really in demand. That's dropped the quality of what's available for swap meets quite dramatically, and knocked a bit of the interest out of it, too.

"But we're getting people bringing different sort of stuff. There'll be people here selling books, there mgiht be a few selling plants. A little bit more of a Sunday market, rather than car-part specific."

Colin Murphy says they're consciously adapting to the changing market. "A lot of the smaller swap meets have actually folded, because of that. We found that it started to slow down for us about two years ago. However, with a couple of the other swap meets that folded, we've actually picked up again for the last couple of years.

"I don't know how long swap meets as such will continue in Australia," Murphy reflects, "because of the amount of goods that are being sold on eBay. Provided we can move with the times, we will survive."

7 rules of swap meets: