“I don’t think I’m anything out of the box. I just think if you work hard enough and long enough, you’ll get somewhere”. – Sir Reginald Ansett.

THE STORY

On the morning of 5th December, 1931, a young Reginald Ansett drove a Studebaker car from Hamilton to Ballarat, a car identical to this is a prize of the museum.

The Ansett empire was born.

Just eleven years later, this one-man passenger service, started with a secondhand car, had become the biggest road passenger service in the Commonwealth.

The “road” was not always a smooth one. Around the mid 1930s the Victorian Government took steps to curb the development of the young Ansett company . . . it was proving a more popular service than the State-owned railways.

Undaunted, Reginald Ansett flew his moth aircraft to Sydney, navigating with a road map, and bought a Fokker Universal passenger plane. On 17th February, 1936, the Fokker Universal left Hamilton for Melbourne . . . the rest is history.

Ansett was then an international airline operating one of the most modern fleets in the world.