Aurora Caravans. East Brunswick, Vic.

G'day drivinglights,

Good to hear from you, we love getting in touch with relos of the pioneers of the caravan industry in Australia.
As you can see we don't know a lot about Aurora caravans so any photos and information you can provide will be much appreciated.
Do you know for how long your grandfather was involved in the industry and how many models of the Aurora were made ?

I posted the above photo in 2008, since then I've acquired a newer scanner so I'll see if I can post a clearer copy so you may be able to say for certain sure if it is your grandmother sitting on the step..... Who do you think the child might be ?




Cobber

Hi Gentlemen, thank you for the warm welcome! (and apologies for my tardiness in replying! )

Thank you Don for your research on Aurora advertising, too. Fascinating to see these little time-capsules, forgotten parts of my grandparents' world.

My grandfather (William Smith) was from Leeds. He started life in Australia in the timbermills around Kerrisdale, near Seymore. Trained as a draftsman and builder, he worked in a variety of areas, finally building himself a caravan to live in while he worked on far-flung projects such as wheat silos.
He sold the car and van and started-up Aurora vans in 1936 at the address above, 458 Lygon Street. (He bought the land and had the factory built.)
The building still stands. The front is now a bridal / dress shop and the rear is a dance studio. The small rooms along one side which are now offices / bathroom are the remains of the small unit-style living quarters he built and in which he, my gran (Joan) and later my mum Carrol lived. There are still gorgeous etched-glass doors in the building from "back in the day."
Gran believes Aurora were the first professionally produces 'vans in Australia - certainly in Melbourne. A few years later Don vans in Dandenong started up and then Romany Road, however she recalls that Romany Road went broke so for many years it was just Aurora and Don. They ran the business until 1963, after which they stopped producing vans and started a hardware store.
Aurora vans were produced with a laminated timber frame, clad inside and out with ply. The outside was then covered again with calico and this bonded into the skin with special paint. Grandad sold and leased vans, with two versions predominating; a 10' three-berth and a 12' four-berth, both featuring fold-out beds, metho or gas stoves, watertanks and sinks.
In the ads above, the lady sitting in the doorway is Joan and the toddler is Carrol.

Here are a couple of pics of a 10' van at an unknown garage, one of the factory's window (from inside ;D) and one of their 1938 Ford V8 (oh if only Gran still had this!! )









If anyone knows of an Aurora Van in the flesh, please let me know as I'd dearly love to see one and know that Mum and Gran would be thrilled too.

G'day Drivinglights,

All good stuff mate, thanks for posting those photos and telling us some of the history of the firm.

Do you know if the proposed tour of the UK in an Aurora caravan actually took place ? It would be interesting to follow that up if it happened.

Cobber.

Gee wouldn't it be good if an Aurora caravan came out of a shed somewhere as a result of this thread

Too many antidotes about the tour in England won't be enough ... keep 'em coming

Cobber.

Certainly a wonderful photo of the interior of the Aurora van.
A large array of different cupboards and a built-in radio !!!.
Love the scenes up at the windows .....nice touch for the brochure ;D
Cheers
Murray

Jill,
Aurora vans were only ever hired/sold under that name.
Early vans were the ply-and-canvas as described above, but by the end they were making aluminium vans.

Cobber,
Mum recalls that the holiday was a great success, touring around long before the advent of caravan parks as we know them. The usual procedure each night was to use a roadside lay-by, or the turn-in for a field. Even better was to find the farmer and ask if they could use a corner of a paddock. This resulted in Mum being chased by cows on more than one occasion!
In the pic above, you can see a kookaburra, koala and map of Australia on the van. These were cut out in ply, painted and screwed on, however they didn't last the trip.... Curious and well-meaning locals were knocking on the door every time the family stopped wanting to talk about Australia and the trip, usually just at dinner time. In the interests of privacy Grandad removed them.
The flipside to this is that my grandfolks met some wonderful people, especially the farming families who allowed them to camp in a corner of their field. The children of a couple of these families still send Grandma Christmas cards.

I asked Gran the other night about the trip, Cobber. She recalls that one night some sort of health inspector turned up on their doorstep (footplate? running board?) and asked to have a look around. He was very impressed with the layout, which included a camping toilet mounted on the drawbar with a tent-style device mounted around it when set up for the night. Not all people were so friendly however, with the family being "moved on" one afternoon by a landowner who objected to them stopping on the roadside for a cuppa. Seems he owned the land right up to the road itself and didn't want travellers - Australian or otherwise - stopping on his turf.
At the end of the trip my Grandfather was quite disillusioned and frustrated with the "petty small-mindedness" that was overtaking post-war UK and couldn't wait to get home. Unfortunately, berths from the UK to Aus were at a premium because of the migration demand. Fortunately, one of the farmers who had befriended them "knew a man" at the docks...some papers were shuffled and they managed to jump the queue and come home. No mean feat since the "queue" was nearly 12months long!
As for the caravan, as you mention, the caravan industry in the UK was in its infancy and there was simply no demand for the Smith family 'van. Rather than leave it to rot, Grandad broke it down to its flat-pack form again, stuck it back in its box and took it home where he promptly sold it.
On the plus side, while in the UK, Grandad was reminded of the prevalence of gas lighting - a trend he decided to put to good use. He bought a whole-sale quantity of gas mantles and brought them home with him. As a result, post-war Aurora vans were fitted with gas lighting using proper lime-soaked mantles. This was something of a selling point since mains-power options were so limited for travellers.

During the war, demand for caravans was very low and materials were often scarce. Apparently the factory kept going with a line of "Wood Art" homewares - things such as sewing boxes, lamp-stands, dustpan & brush sets, etc, which were well-made and decorated. A particularly successful line was hand-painted lamp shades, sold by a distributor in Melbourne. At its height, the Wood Art sideline employed 6 artists hand-painting the items.
During this time, petrol was rationed, but metho was still readily available. The factory bought metho in 44-gallon drums for making the shellac used on the Wood Art products. Since the petrol ration was just 4 gallons a month, Grandad used some of the metho to stretch reserves a little further. Grandma recalls that the "procedure" for running the car involved tipping some precious petrol in the carby to get it started, then allowing it to run on the metho after that. "It didn't have the same go as petrol" she says, "but it was a beautifully clean-burning fuel and it was better than not having anything!"
The factory still built the odd van during the war, but could only complete them as supplies allowed. Gran told me that in trying to source plywood, she would be sent off to a particular timber yard to see a particular man and be told in hushed tones, "I can let you have 6 sheets, bring the car around the back."

From the start, construction of the vans was by a technique evolved from what Grandad had seen when he did some work at Essendon airport. He made jigs for the side frames and multiple slats were laid-down in the jig, overlapping to form laminated frames. These sides were stood up and the cross-pieces added to make the box shape. Covering the outer ply with calico and bonding it into the paint was a development of the doped-fabric "stressed-skin" technique used on aircraft bodies. With the laminated timber frame and calico covering the vans were apparently very strong in a "springy" sort of way. Gran tells of one rental customer who towed a van too quickly and managed to roll it on a sharp corner. It just bounced. Once a new hitch was fitted, the van was still intact enough to tow back to the factory for repairs without any dramas.

Hope this is interesting to people. I'll add more nuggets of information as they come to hand.
Do you know of any vintage-caravan repair specialists around the south-east of Australia? I might pester some of them to see if they have ever seen an Aurora.
Cheers,
drivinglights.