Australia’s first VW Beetle restored in Adelaide bound for war memorial

Why a banged-up old VW, restored in the suburban garage on the edge of Adelaide, is now valued around $300,000 bound for display at the Australian War Memorial.

Andrew Paterson with his restored 1945 Type 51 Volkswagen Beetle. Picture: Matt Turner

It could have been the Australian people’s car. In the aftermath of World War II a plan was hatched to make the VW Beetle our national car.

Today, the Beetle that was at the centre of that historical moment has been found, and restored in Adelaide, and is expected to soon take its place on the national stage as an exhibit at the Australian War Memorial.

The story of how that car came to Australia and lived to tell the tale is due to South Australian car restorer Dr Andrew Paterson, of Chandlers Hill.

The history of the car began within the bombed-out ruins of the original Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, near Hanover, in Germany.

It was 1945 and the Allies occupying Germany were looking for a place to repair their vehicles. At Wolfsburg they found both a factory and a city full of starving people who were once its employees. It was a big factory in a specially constructed city aimed at producing Hitler’s promise of a people’s car before war broke out.

A British officer, Major Ivan Hirst, realised that rather than simply repairing their vehicles, the factory and the people of Wolfsburg could also be put to work making the VW developed by Ferdinand Porsche in the pre-war years.

By September 1945, even before the factory had its roof back on, Type 51 VWs were coming off the production line. The ungainly Beetle had finally come into existence, built by the Allies. The only previous examples, known as KDF Type 60s, had been built in small numbers in 1937 and later as wartime Red Cross cars.

The three millionth Volkswagen (VW) Beetle on assembly line at Wolfsburg factory in 1959.

Type 51s were based on the wartime Kubelwagen and Schwimmwagen military versions with Porsche’s beetle-shaped aerodynamic body shell put back on top.

Models were sent to the US, Canada, Norway, the UK and Australia for production consideration as part of the war reparations deals. Two were sent to Australia.

The VW now in a shed in Chandlers Hill came off the production line in October 1945, just months after the conclusion of the war, and the following year arrived in Australia, where it was completely dismantled for a technical appraisal. As in other countries, the Australian government decided that the VW was too weird to ever find a market. Who would have thought it would become the world’s biggest-selling car one day?

Instead, the Holden would become Australia’s national car, launched in 1948 and built by General Motors. The two VWs had completed their mission and were sold at auction in 1949.

Paterson’s car would be bought by a Colin Smith of Sydney, who used it for many years before it was passed on through several owners. By the early 70s it was a mess, sitting in a wrecker’s yard at French Island off the coast of Victoria.

A VW collector, Graham Roberts, saw that it had the split rear window of early models and bought it.

A strange thing happened as he was on the ferry back to the mainland with the VW on a trailer. The ferry operator said: “You know that’s Australia’s first VW.”

He didn’t, but the ferryman proved it by peeling off some of the paint to show him the original matte black duco on the car, specific to the VW originals.

The interior of Andrew Paterson’s 1945 Type 51 Volkswagen Beetle. Picture Matt Turner

It spent the next 35 years in storage, but as more of the story of the VW was uncovered it intrigued Paterson and he bought it, still unrestored, in 2008.

He had been restoring and racing cars for his whole life, starting with a Model A Ford he bought on the day he turned 16. He moved on to MGs, Minis and Wolseleys, and his prowess as a classic car restorer grew until his series of restorations of run-down 356 Porches bought from the US, selling for up to $350,000 each, earned him a name among wealthy car collectors.

Paterson said he found restorations a respite from his busy and stressful other life. And that has been quite a life.

What started out as a career as a Methodist minister was gradually up-ended through his connections with the protest movements of the 1960s and 70s, which first came to public attention when he was Flinders University’s chaplain.

In 1972 his name was spread across the nation in those still-wowserish times when he was reported in The Advertiser and then the front page of The Australian as the minister in an obscenity case, testifying that he regarded four-letter words as part of general usage among students – and even used them himself.

By then he had been caught up in the Vietnam moratorium campaign, and even more notably in the Springboks South African rugby tour protests. At Norwood Oval in 1971, a demonstration Springboks game turned into a riot when thousands of anti-Apartheid protesters disrupted the match, held back by 500 police. Paterson was one of the protest’s instigators.

He recalls the day after his arrest at the Springboks game, Sir Donald Bradman summoned him to his city office. Was it possible, The Don wanted to know, to go ahead with the South African cricket tour that summer? Paterson said no and at its next meeting, the Australian Cricket Board abandoned the Test series.

Andrew Paterson with his restored 1945 Type 51 Beetle. Picture Matt Turner.

By 1974 Paterson had a degree in psychology and was studying social work at Flinders University.

The Department of Community Welfare asked if he would help work with troubled young people becoming involved in drugs, and that led to another role, establishing Crisis Care, dealing with domestic violence cases in partnership with SA Police.

Paterson decided it was time to resign from the Methodist church and become a social worker.

He would go on to run the Mobilong Prison, and later supervise masters students in social work at Flinders University. More recently, after completing his PhD in social work in the justice system in 2018, he become a part-time lecturer at Flinders University’s Law School.

Through all his busy life, Paterson has continued the slow and painstaking process of car restoration. Two Series 1 Land Rovers coming back to life next to the VW speak to that.

There were also the racing years, starting with lightweight MG TFs and ending in Formula 2-era racing cars.

Starting in 2013, the Type 51 VW was completely dismantled and each component recorded and rebuilt, item by item.

A VW history boffin from Nowra, the late “Country Buggy Bill” Moore, had been to Europe to check the car’s original serial and engine numbers from the factory data sheet. He found the documentation that authenticated its travels to Australia.

Things slowly fell into place. The original engine was still in the car, and was able to be freed up and restored along with its original synchro-free “crash” gearbox. Incredibly, missing parts of the Type 51 could still be found, largely because of the popularity of restorations of the wartime Kubelwagen. Type 51 Beetles were built on the Kubelwagen base, which gives this model a self-locking differential and high clearance for cross-country use.

The Beetle was restored at Paterson’s Chandlers Hill home. Picture Matt Turner.

A dealer in Belgium proved invaluable for finding everything from a new steering wheel to an original jack and crank. Yes, the original 1131cc VW could be crank-started.

A replacement transaxle, unique to the Type 51, was located in Poland. An original 1945 petrol tank was also found, as were replacements for the original twin battery holders left over from the Kubelwagen.

Bakelite fittings and speedometer, and even a gearstick knob with the original dimple and VW logo, a VW circled by a cogged wheel, were still available. Reproduction hubcaps were among the rare resorts to non-original parts.

The most challenging was restoring the paintwork, the matte black body colour. An Adelaide paint shop had to learn the technique. It was the most expensive part of a very expensive restoration.

Nonetheless, the car, built in the ashes of the Third Reich, was no subject for a concours d’elegance. Paterson says he was careful to keep to its original build quality and resist the temptation to go further.

The very simple seats of tubular steel were reupholstered when he was tipped off that a bolt of cloth specially ordered for another restoration on an early VW was surplus to requirements.

Paterson knows of just three Series 51 VWs in the world – one in the US, another in Germany and this one in Adelaide.

When Porsche’s then chief of quality control, Bernd Hemminger, visited Adelaide a couple of years ago, he was sufficiently intrigued to make an inspection. He described it as a highlight of his visit.

Once the car was complete, in 2019, Paterson decided to follow his usual practice and put it on the market through an Adelaide classic car retailer. However, as the international inquiries came in, he realised its importance to Australia would not be recognised if it was sold overseas. He decided it was the kind of car that should not leave Australia’s shores.

“I did not want it to end up in some wealthy orthodontist’s private garage, brought out for show once a year,” he said.

The last edition of the Beetle on show at the Puebla plant in Mexico in 2003.

He withdrew the car from sale, although one happy outcome was that the advertisements were noticed by Jeff Brown, grandson of the original 1949 buyer at auction, and with his help Paterson was able to flesh out more of the VW’s life in Australia.

Next, he approached the National Motor Museum at Birdwood. He said the curator there suggested that acquiring it would be beyond their resources and instead he should talk to the National War Memorial.

There, the curators reported back after a fortnight and said they wanted to have it as an important item signifying Australia’s involvement in the aftermath of the European war and Germany’s reconstruction.

“They said it was significant in three ways,” Paterson says. “It was built by the Allies, secondly it came to Australia at the behest of the government, and thirdly they auctioned it when they finished with it. So that’s where it will end up.”

Not only had the VW been sent to Australia for consideration as our national car, but an early inspection of the car and the Wolfsburg plant had been made by Australia’s pioneering car maker, Laurence Hartnett. Hartnett, general manager of General Motors Holden in the 1930s, was made Australia’s director of ordnance production during the war.

His enthusiasm for an Australian-built car helped precipitate General Motors’ decision to build the Holden in Adelaide from 1948, and he went on to build his own Australian cars before introducing the first of the Japanese runabouts, the Nissan Bluebird, to Australia in the 1960s.

Paterson has restored and sold more than 40 cars, most of them Porsches, and in his own garage is parked an Aston Martin Vantage and a not-half-bad Mercedes 350, but he says he definitely does not have the resources or the tax problem to gift his VW to the museum.

Instead, a longwinded process of negotiation, common to many public gifts, has begun. The restored VW has been examined, documented and valued from recent sales around the $300,000 mark and the museum is in search of a suitable patron who might be persuaded to buy the car as a future exhibit.

For now, the car sits in its garage, fired up for the occasional outing, and would be just another VW except for its matte black paintwork, its knobbly 16-inch tyres, and its long, long slice of VW history.