Here’s A Tour Of An Australian Junkyard Filled With Fords You Probably Know Nothing About

Touring new car dealerships will show you the current automotive state of play in a given area. Used car lots will give you a cross-section of the last couple of decades. Junkyards, though, will tell you stories stretching back decades. I recently headed out to one on a flying visit to my hometown, and decided to chronicle the stocks of old Fords for audiences both foreign and domestic.

I shot this with an eye to American and, to a lesser extent European audiences. I aim to educate on the magic of the Falcon, and what you can learn from what you do and don’t find in the junkyard. If you’re an Australian, much of what I pontificate on will not be news to you, unless you’re maybe less than 15 years old. Still, you may enjoy watching it and laughing at me for mixing up XD and XFs and misquoting generations of Laser.

As you’ll see, Australian junkyards are full of Ford Falcons. Once upon a time, the four-door sedan ruled the roost, as did the inline-six engine. The Falcon primarily did battle against the Holden Commodore, and before that, the Kingswood. Later in its life, it would tangle with the Mitsubishi Magna and the globally-beloved Toyota Camry.

No matter where you landed on the timeline, the Ford Falcon typically offered good torque from a stout inline six. At times, it was available with a V8, but the vast majority of Australian families considered six cylinders to be enough. These were Aussie cars with Aussie engines, put together with Aussie blood, sweat, and tears. And, unlike the rival Holden Commodore, Falcons were designed here, too. They were built to roam the vast distances between our capital cities, haul the kids to school, and to pick us up from the airport. The Falcon, in particular, was an absolute darling of the taxi industry, particularly in the 1990s.

Fuel economy was never really a strong point of the type, but in the halcyon days of cheap gas, nobody cared. Eventually the 2000s would see the beginning of a terminal decline for the model as Australians shifted to hipper SUVs and fuel-sipping hatchbacks. But in the 20th century? The Falcon ruled Ford’s Australian lineup. 

In the video above, you’ll see that I found a selection of models from the early 1980s up to the mid-2000s. Newer Falcons are mostly still on the road, with production ending in 2016. Earlier models dating pre-1980 are typically worth too much money to be found in a junkyard like this; you’ll instead find them in personal paddock collections or at specialty classic yards. My visit chronicles the journey from the carbureted 3.3- and 4.1-liter sixes of the XD, XE, and XF, through to the fuel injected age that dawned in the late 1980s. First with the EA Falcon, with its beleaguered 3.9-liter donk with the single injector, and then on to the EB Falcon and beyond with their far more advanced multi-point injection engines.

The Barra

Our journey through time ends at the mighty Barra, seen here in a number of BA Falcon sedans and wagons. The engine has become Internet famous as a powerful turbocharged inline-six. In that guise, it was first delivered in the Ford Falcon XR6 Turbo in 2002, delivering 322 horsepower. However, the Barra wasn’t just a turbo hero engine. It also served as the base motor for the Falcon in its naturally-aspirated form. Even then, it still put out a healthy 244 horsepower from its 4.0-liter displacement. That was largely courtesy of double overhead cams and variable cam timing. This marked the first time these were standard on the Falcon lineup.

Indeed, the Barra even got a version designed from the factory to run on liquified petroleum gas, or LPG, which delivered 209 horsepower. Today, it’s known as the greentop engine, and is prized for its thicker rods, which allow it to handle more power when built up as a turbocharged gasoline engine.

I also dive into some other curios at the yard. The AU Falcon, which served as one of the worst examples of Ford’s 90s “New Edge” styling. There’s also the Falcon XH ute – basically an ancient 1980s ute body with 1990s running gear up front. Yes, Ford got lazy, and when it built the E-series Falcons in the 1990s, it couldn’t be bothered styling a ute model. Instead, it just stuck the front end of the 1996 EL model on the 1980s XF model’s rear end and tray.

There was also a Falcon Longreach van – basically the XH ute, but with a metal canopy on top. It’s not unlike the body style of the famous Holden Sandman. The Sandman became a symbol of sexual liberation for the youth culture of the 1970s and 1980s. However, by the 90s, it was no longer cool or in vogue to build a modified van with a bed in the back, and the Longreach was mostly just used as a vehicle for tradies.

There’s more to Ford than Falcons, of course. I also hit on classics like the Ford Laser, which was a hugely popular small car in the 1980s and 1990s. It used Mazda B-series engines, also seen in cars like the Mazda 121 and Mazda Miata. We also got a couple of generations of Festiva, the second of which was sold in North America as the Ford Aspire. It wasn’t a vehicle to aspire to here, and I doubt it was for Americans, either. We also got a smattering of examples of the Ford Focus, a few of which show up in our wrecking yards. Ideally though, any with the Powershift transmission would be thrown straight in the crusher to wipe the scourge from the Earth for good.

There’s one thing you will struggle to find in this wrecking yard, though. It’s a V8 engine. Now, don’t get me wrong. Aussies love their V8s, they really do. Or… they say they do. But really, Australian culture is often about saying one thing, but doing another. After all, we’re the laidback country of lovable larrikins that will fine you for drinking a beer on the beach. We say we love our V8s, but we didn’t actually buy that many.

Sure; if you go to an American junkyard, you’ll be tripping over trucks and old Malaise era junk left right and center. You’ll find all kinds of V8s of high and low tune, iron heads and alloy heads, the lot. You can score yourself a junkyard LS for a thousand bucks or two, slap on an eBay turbo, and you’ll be a YouTube hero in no time. Not so Down Under.

In Australia, we pretty much only got V8 engines in out and out performance models from Holden and Ford. Sure, they could be had for a fair price when new, but the vast majority of customers stuck to the base engines. Hell, Ford Australia even stopped making and selling V8s entirely in 1982, eventually bringing them back in 1991 with imported 5.0-liter Windsor engines from the US.

Thus, the V8 models that remain are highly valued compared to garden-variety models. An old rusty Falcon might have only been worth a few hundred bucks, and so it was easy enough to send it to the junkyard. V8 models never really got that cheap, even used, and typically get parted out by owners or end up at higher-end specialty wreckers. Low-buck junkyards have few to no V8s; I didn’t spot a single one in my adventures today.

I hope this has given you a little glimpse at Australian car culture, and I hope to do it again some day. Even better, I’d love to do it with a better camera set up and a decent microphone. Share your tales of junkyard adventures below, or tell me what you love or hate about Australian cars. You know I love the banter!

Image credits: Lewin Day