Boom time Rolls: the story of SDB26 © Tom Clarke, 2018
‘As a uniformed schoolboy, I watched in wonder as women in smart suits by Balenciaga stepped from Rolls-Royces to shop in the market town’s Gray Street.’ Thus wrote Richard Zachariah about boom-time 1950s Hamilton in Victoria. His book The Vanished Land (2017) ranges nostalgically over the ‘disappearing dynasties of Victoria’s Western District’. My own car wasn’t owned by a dynasty, and it came from the Wimmera region on the northern fringes of the Western District, but the boom-time connection was the same. This is its story.