A queue at the Dickson Motor Registry in 1968. Photo: National Archives of Australia.
For decades, the Dickson Motor Registry was perhaps the most hated place in Canberra.
It was where every ACT-registered vehicle had to front up once a year for a pink slip – the piece of paper that said your car was roadworthy for another 12 months.
We recently shared a post to The Canberra Page on Facebook, asking for your memories of the inspection station – and very quickly realised we’d hacked into a nerve.
The flood of responses lamented hours-long waits, summer heat, unforgiving inspectors – and sometimes elaborate schemes to scrape a pass.
“The most stressful day of the year when you were a young bloke,” one person wrote.
Another recalled “automatically feeling guilty, even though there was no cause for it”.
Hume Motor Vehicle Inspection Station. Photo: AMC Architects.
Where it all began
Vehicle inspections in the ACT date back to 1936, according to a 2004 discussion paper by the ACT Department of Urban Services.
The earliest inspections were conducted outdoors on an open-circuit track next to the Royal Canberra Hospital, followed by inspections at Mort Street, Braddon, in 1962.
The Dickson inspection station then came along in 1968. But by the early 1980s, the queues were frequently two to three hours long.
One commenter remembered cars “lined up around the block”, while another said they had “seen the cars backed up all the way to Northbourne Avenue”.
For many families, rego day meant writing off an entire morning – or more.
“I remember having to take the whole morning off work to get the car registered,” one person said. Another remembered going with their parents: “It was a day trip, and you needed to take lunch.”
Summer-time inspections were especially brutal.
“Our old Falcon XC became due on 23 December,” one Canberran wrote.
“Used to take an esky, drinks, lunch and three very young children each year. Hot as Hades and a dreadful way to spend half a day!!”
Others tried tactics to shorten the pain.
“Friday afternoon was the best time to go over the pits,” one advised.
Another swore by bad weather: “Always go on a wet day so the dripping on the guys underneath would hopefully stop them looking too hard. Didn’t always work, though.”
The Dickson Motor Registry, before it closed. Photo: Paul Costigan.
Tricks and schemes to win a pass
For young drivers with less-than-immaculate cars and not much cash, the inspection station loomed as an even greater hurdle.
“Yes, quite stressful for young people of modest means,” one commenter wrote. “And most of the English-built cars had as much oil outside of the engine as inside.”
This bred a veritable cottage industry in last-minute fixes. Borrowed tyres. Steel wool stuffed into exhaust pipes to quieten noisy Mazda rotary engines. And people wiping oil off the sump with a rag just before rolling in.
One recalled “spending the previous day spraying anti-grease under the sump and gearbox”. Another admitted to “install[ing] a hidden switch to turn off the brake lights” so a Mini’s handbrake could pass the test.
It also seemed to matter who brought the car through.
“The smart boys always got their girlfriends to take their flash cars over the pits,” one woman wrote.
A man claimed his FE Holden failed twice – until a young and blonde female neighbour offered to drive it in. “It was passed with no problems.”
Others barely tried at all. And probably should have bought a lottery ticket that day.
A driver in a Holden Camira resigned himself to failure when the horn died on inspection morning. But when asked to sound it, he leaned out the window and yelled “BEEP!” instead.
“I PASSED!! Crazy! 100% true.”
Others weren’t so lucky. One person remembered a Dodge Fargo truck that was “basically holes joined together by rusty metal”. And predictably, the brake pedal went straight to the floor when called upon. “Needless to say, he failed the test.”
The end of the line
By the late 1970s, wait times at Dickson were so bad that the ACT Government cut the requirement for annual inspections and opened the service up to private mechanics, too.
From October 1980, vehicles that were one year old were no longer required to be presented for inspection. Subsequent years saw further changes that required even fewer people to visit, to the point that by the end of 1995, only vehicles over 10 years old were required to be presented for inspection. Nowadays, it’s only for private vehicles over six years old transferring ownership.
The Access Canberra shopfront at Dickson closed in September 2017, replaced by a new Motor Vehicle Inspection Station in Hume. Fingers crossed the queues stay short there.
