History

"The Brisbane Vintage Auto Club was formed at a meeting held at the Guide hall, Baskerville Street, Brighton, on Wednesday 5^th February 1969. The meeting commenced at 8pm with fourteen potential members."

These are the first few lines of the minutes of meeting No. 1 and so the foundations of our Club were laid.

In 2019, we celebrated 50 years.

 Initially the Club catered for all types of vehicles manufactured before 1942. This was amended around 1990 to include post-war vehicles up to 1950 that were essentially the same as their pre-war counterparts. A subsequent recent amendment now recognises vehicles older than 30 years as Club Vehicles.

 Since those times, the Club has done much to foster the Old Car movement and hundreds of members have passed through the Club. Within a couple of years the Club hosted two-day open rallies - the Autumn Rally which in those days even made the 6 o'clock news on occasions. It was events like this that helped establish a comradeship with kindred clubs, both local and far flung.

 The Club also instigated and conducted for many years in the late 70's and early 80's a Petrol Consumption Test, which was also an open event and attracted up to about 60 entrants. However it is in the conduct of Swap Meets that the Club excelled over a period of 30 years from the mid 1970s. These started off as one day events in local parks, progressing to the Redcliffe Showgrounds, then on to the Sandgate District High School and finally to the Lawnton Showgrounds.

 For some of this time our Swap equalled or exceeded the Toowoomba Swap as the biggest in the State. We could not do this totally on our own so we enlisted local Rotary Clubs to provide manpower and, through them, many thousands of dollars were made available for community projects.

Within the Club our annual Spring Tour was a very popular event. This was run over 8 or 9 days in the first week in September from 1977 to 1992 attracting up to about 15 cars, mainly with couples.

Tours ranged from Bundaberg to Coffs Harbour and west to Dalby and Inverell and sometimes exceeded 1000 miles in length.

Where do we go from here?

Membership age group is changing and modern traffic is harder to negotiate with our old veteran, vintage and post-vintage cars. It is obvious that the later models of the 60s & 70s will become the norm for many of our events.

 History written by Reg Harris, amended by Rod Hibberd 2026