my car
rover the hills From the garden shed to King of the Paddock, Michael Spillane resurrects a British legend’s glory days. - Curt Dupriez They say money can’t buy you happiness, though it’ll buy a shiny new Range Rover so you can drive up right alongside. So the prospect of discovering motoring bliss without prying open the wallet is very slim. But not impossible. And that’s what Dr Michael Spillane discovered ten years ago when fate and luck intervened, and he first crossed paths with his Land Rover Series 1. “I was offered it for free, by a friend of a friend of a friend,” said the 56-year-old general practitioner. “And ‘free’ was the original attraction. I had always had a Rover 100 sedan, which shares a lot of heritage with the Land Rover and has a six-cylinder version of the early Land Rover’s unusual (four-cylinder) engine layout. I thought my Rover 100, ‘Regina’, would like a little brother.” Fittingly, Michael named the Land Rover ‘Reginald’.
Conceived in the 1940s as a farmer’s ally, and inspired by America’s Willys Jeep, early Land Rovers were a sort of missing link between truck and tractor. Tough, rudimentary in their engineering, uncompromisingly utilitarian and quite a commercial success in their day, they’re now bona-fide cult vehicles. A few years back, Land Rover claimed 70 percent of the original generation were still on the road, though plainly not roads around Bendigo. Reginald’s breed is a rarity on the modern landscape, left of field...way over on the other side of the motoring paddock. They also ooze character by the barn-load. And it’s easy to see the appeal of attempting to restore one. Michael admits that, at the outset, “free” meant little expectation of workable raw material. “When I collected the car from Balnarring it was in pieces, sitting in a collapsed garden shed by the sea. Luckily the
I use it as it was originally intended. It’s great on country roads, even more so off-road.
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Photographer: David Field
It would take seven years, reasonable expense and considerable elbow grease before Reginald was fit for the sort of agricultural service it was originally built for over half a century ago. The free and immediate bliss, though, was the adventure of the process. Michael had never before attempted a full vehicle restoration.