The Secret Garden

IT’S not every day that you’re asked to cover your eyes when you reach the end of a journey, but as the property I was going to visit was in an obscure and somewhat unexpected location, its owner, Ian Duddy, preferred me to not to know exactly where I was.

I had an idea of what I was going to see, but after literally being led up the garden path and being told that I could open my eyes, I was simply stunned. Here, in the middle of a quiet residential area of Melbourne, is what is probably the largest gathering of Suffix A and B classic Range Rovers in existence. Admittedly, not all of them are in the best of shape, but as they’re all pretty much original, it wouldn’t take much to combine several together to make a significant number of early classic Range Rovers.

Ian, along with his friend and business partner Tim Embleton, told me that this incredible collection of Range Rovers – along with a few Series Land Rovers including no less than nine 80-inch models and a handful of early P38As – represents a lifetime of collecting. The property belonged to Ian’s parents, and when his dad passed away in 2005, he decided to make use of the garden to store the early Range Rovers he had. Two Range Rovers became three, then four, then six, and over a