Vale Ian Farren

One of the Australian caravan industry’s true pioneers, Ian Farren, has died after a long illness. He was 80.

Farren left Franklin Caravans in 1959 to co-found Coronet Caravans in Ballarat and in 1966 had the distinction of building the largest caravan yet seen in Australia – a 36ft monster.

By 1967, Coronet was one of Australia’s largest caravan manufacturers and was selling nationally, with 40 per cent of production being dispatched by road and rail to customers outside Victoria.

Coronet was by then employing 80 men and women, constructing 32 different models and also custom building caravans in its new, larger Ballarat premises.

In the early years, Coronet produced bondwood-clad caravans moving into silver aluminium and thereafter white aluminium cladding that became the industry standard.

Ian Farren believed in controlling his own business destiny and by the 1970s was building his own chassis, had his own plywood company to fabricate his caravan’s walls, made his own aluminium-framed windows and rolled his own aluminium exterior wall cladding.

Later, he travelled overseas regularly and imported a lot of his own equipment.

Farren, like his contemporaries at Viscount. Millard and Franklin, was a true ‘caravanner’. He would build himself a caravan each year to take his family away on holiday and, when he returned, it would go into the workshop with a list of improvements to be made.

Classic Coronet caravans included the Prince and Princess (each launched in the mid-’70s), and the Champion (early-’70s), which, as the decade drew to a close, was replaced by the Nomad.

In the late 1970s, Coronet bought out all existing orders of Newlands Caravans and further expanded, but the company was caught up in the post ‘Energy Crisis’ financial pinch of the late-'70s and ultimately closed its doors in 1979.

The Coronet name then lay dormant for around 12 years before young Melbourne-based caravan repairer Andrew Phillips started building his own vans and ‘picked up’ the Coronet name in 1991.

In 2011, Phillips named one of the re-named Coronet RV’s most popular pop-top touring models the ‘Farren’ in honour of the brand’s founder, because of its family-friendly format and price.

Below is one of three interesting videos on Youtube that show Coronet’s early history...