The Bruce Wells Collection

[Steve Holmes]

I received an email a few weeks back, out of the blue, from Bruce Wells. It simply read; "I have a collection of photo's (around 900 of) that were taken in the sixties mainly at Oran Park, Catalina Park, Warwick Farm and Bathurst. If they are of use to your site let me know and I will put them to disc and post them to you. Regards, Bruce Wells". As you can probably gather, I couldn't type my reply fast enough.

Some of you will be familiar with the name Bruce Wells, as Bruce was regular photographic contributor to various Australian car magazines, most prominently, Motor Racing News. The collection of photos he has sent me cover the years 1962 - 1967. As Bruce told me "I had the negatives stored away and after all this time I noticed a deterioration in the quality, so quickly copied them to the computer to save what I could".

What I love about this collection is that Bruce doesn't just focus on the leading lights, his collection also includes many of the 'Specials' that were so popular in Australia at this time. The collection is large, and I will be splitting it over several parts, so the importance of each image isn't lost in the crowd. Bruce has split the images into folders, based on the tracks, and the dates for each race track he covered, and for the most part I'll create the threads in a similar fashion.

So each part will be as follows:

Hume Weir
Bathurst
Catalina Park
Lakeside
Oran Park
Silverdale Hillclimb
Warwick Farm

There is also a stunning collection of driver photos.

Kicking things off though, is this folder of miscellaneous images, which Bruce has separated out as they don't fit within any of the other folders. Most photos in the collection are b/w, but this part is predominantly in colour.

Please feel free to jump in and name names, as I certainly don't have all the answers. Bruce has named some photos, and I've managed to track down a few further details.

So here it is, The Bruce Wells Collection, Part 1.