MG Motoring 2016 | Seite 13

December 2016 I had a few things to report. MGC owner John Craven has been very busy scanning the web and collecting information on MGCs around Australia. John responded to a discussion in the MGC Report in July last year regarding the number of cars in Australia. He has compiled an Australian MGC Register of 80 identified cars with about another 75 known cars but still to be fully identified. We’d like to build on that and make a list of MGCs publically available in a similar way to the New Zealand MGC Register. Next year is the 50th Anniversary of the launch of the MGC so what better time to make the list public than the MG National Meeting 2017 in Adelaide. Having a list of identified MGCs can add to the security of the model. Some years ago a register list of Torana XU1s was used to identify a fraudulent copy. The new owner of this freshly restored XU1 was not happy having paid a lot of money for a car that was not genuine so he involved the police. John has also been reviewing the colours of MGCs and their relationship to other marques in the BMC/BMLC group. ‘Glasso White’ was a bit of a mystery colour until the UK Register people told us all police cars were painted this special shade of white. The other MGC project that John has been working on is titled “Where Did They Go?” He lists the numbers of cars recorded in the Factory records that were dispatched to the different centres in the UK, the different States in the USA and to various countries. We wondered why 10 MGCs were exported to Zambia and eight to the Congo. 26 MGCs were dispatched to the South American region including the Bahamas and even one to Surinam, have you heard of that country? In the Asia/Pacific region one car was dispatched to Cambodia, four to Australia, 10 to Japan, 26 to New Zealand and 17 to the Australian Territory of Papua. Does anyone know why 17 MGCs went to Papua? Two are now in Tassie and one in NSW and we’ve discovered one that was personally exported to Port Morseby. Thanks for coming out chaps. C ya soon Ian 11