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[Ray Bell]

Perhaps it's about time we looked at when and how Albert Park became a part of the motor racing scene.... this week being the fifth time the World Drivers' Championship contenders have descended on the place.
The park was formerly a rubbish tip, I'm told, but landscaping and 'clearing the swamp' made for a picturesque tree-lined park with a shallow lake covering a number of acres early in the 1900s.
About 1938 there were moves to have motor racing and motorcycle racing held there, but when they fell through the Light Car Club of Australia decided to expend their energies building a circuit near Ballarat almost seventy miles out of Melbourne.
Times were tough, however, for what became referred to in the early issues of Australian Motor Sport as 'the big stoush' consumed the interests of most people for six years.... It was never built, but racing was held at the Ballarat airfield several times up to Dan Gurney's win in 1961.
In 1953, when this airstrip looked like getting the Australian Grand Prix as it was allocated to Victoria (each state staged the race in its turn those days), something clicked and Albert Park was made available.
The event was won by Doug Whiteford driving a Lago Talbot, with the main competition coming from Stan (Alan's daddy) Jones and the Maybach Special, Lex Davison in the HWM Jaguar and - incredibly - Frank Kleinig in the Hudson 8-powered MG-chassised Kleinig Hudson.
Three years later the AGP returned to the park, the sequence of the states being altered to fit in with the Olympic games. Stirling Moss won from Jean Behra in 250Fs and Australians would never again settle for lesser cars....
Racing at Albert Park ceased in 1958, when Moss won the Melbourne Grand Prix in a Rob Walker Cooper.
The roads have been varied considerably to put more corners into the circuit, which now runs clockwise instead of anti-clockwise. Just one thing hasn't changed -
There have always been people willing to protest against running the races in the park.

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Life and love are mixed with pain...