MBCNSW drive to the Australian Motorlife Museum

Today I joined the MBCNSW for a drive to the Australian Motorlife Museum.   The museum is located in Kembla Grange, near Dapto.   It primarily focuses on pre war cars, motorbikes and automotive memorabilia and there are over 100 vehicles on display.  I had previous visited the museum in 2018.   I was looking forward to a return visit as the collection does change, and there is so much to see you’ll always find something new to look at.

The treasurer of the MBCNSW is a board member of the Museum, so he organized a guided tour of the museum.   That was a huge bonus from my previous visit.   Not only did we get  more background on some of the displays, but we also got to tour the behind the scenes workshop and the library.  The museum believe their library to be the largest automotive library in the southern hemisphere.   I could believe it, as it is quite large.

We also got to sit in the back of a very impressive Lanchester and hear the story about the pair of Minervas.   This is a high end car, based in Belgium.  Apparently these cars were the properly of Prince Leopold of Belgium.   The more ornate car being the official car, and the other being for daily use.

The other thing you notice is just how much automotive memorabilia they have on display.   There must be literally thousands of great pieces.

I took my 250SE on the drive.  I was keen to take it on a longer drive with its newly fitted alternator.     The car did really well.    It was a 35C day, and the A/C kept up with the heat pretty well.   The cooling system on that car is really good – it hardly moved off normal operating temperature.    I had by far the oldest car that wasn’t in the museum.  The next oldest was one of the three W126 models – always popular in the club.   Compared to the museum cars, my car was a spring chicken.   Last time I visited, I drove down in the 1954 Citroen Traction Avant I used to own.   It was still quite a bit too new for the museum.

After our tour around the Motorlife Museum, we took in a pub lunch at Kembla Grange before the drive home to Sydney.