AS with drive-ins and little corner stores, the number of traditional car-wrecking yards scattered across Oz is declining. Those paddocks covered with cars, often stacked on stilts of welded wheels, for us to pick to pieces for parts are slowly but surely disappearing.
Also shrinking is the number of the old-school wreckers closer to suburbia; those gold mines of car parts buried deep in the back-street mazes of red or blonde-brick industrial areas, where customers arrive to a greasy driveway and a ‘wotchaaftermate?’ yelled from deep within dimly lit rows of racked bits.
Just before Christmas 2022, Northern Auto Wreckers, one of Sydney’s bigger and older yards in the western district of Londonderry, was scheduled to shut its gates after decades of selling parts from its wooded acres of cars. This business grew from behind a now-vacant petrol station site in the 1930s. Then, in the early days of car ownership, Londonderry was beyond the distance that many Sydneysiders went
