SUSAN CARLAND: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this series
may contain images, voices or names of deceased persons.
[Music]
BRUCE SCATES: This episode, ‘The Australian Way of Life’,
is part of the series that deals with people. We’ll take to the road in
Australia’s first car, the Holden; we’ll examine life in the suburbs in postwar Australia;
consider the politics of the Cold War and America’s enduring cultural influence on our country.
We begin and end this episode in Canberra.
SUSAN CARLAND:I ’m walking through the Landmarks gallery of the National Museum of Australia.
As you can see many of the exhibits here deal with place, the links
between cities, towns and the vast open spaces of Australia.
They remind us of the diverse ways Indigenous and non-indigenous people
have moved across this landscape.
This is a gear hobbing machine, and right here, right now,
with the barest touch of my finger, I’m about to build a motorcar.
Those spinning cogs can cut transmission and timing gears, manufacture spare parts and engineer
machinery in perfect running order. At periods of peak demand, with over a
hundred cars on the assembly line, the whirr of machines like this would have been deafening.
This is the 1950s technology that powered a nation.
BRUCE SCATES: Susan's building an automobile. And not just any automobile, either.
This car’s a Holden – Australia’s first car, manufactured in this country since 1948.
When the first of these cars drove into the showroom it seemed that Australia,
White Australia, had escaped its pastoral beginnings and truly, truly come of age.
Indeed the Australian Prime Minister, Ben Chifley, was there to herald the
arrival of the FX model Holden. Ben Chifley gazed across the sleek, stylish lines,
he reached for his pipe deep in his pocket and he cried out, ‘What a beauty!’
SUSAN CARLAND: There was a lot that seemed beautiful about the first Holdens.
Men loved the power. Under this bonnet there is a grey, six-cylinder, 2.15 litre engine.
It delivered around 60 horsepower and an astonishing cruising speed – back then –
of over 70 miles per hour. The gearbox I’ve just made was part of a three-speed transmission
and it offered exceptional performance and exceptional economy.
BRUCE SCATES: Men and women loved the price.
By 1953 a car like this cost around 700 pounds. In the past, cars had been a luxury item,
but with rising wages in the 50s an automobile like this was seen as within
the reach of even a working-class family. So this was more than a car.
It was a symbol of social status, a mass consumer item for an increasingly affluent society.
By 1962 around a million Holdens had been sold, out-classing the sale of any other vehicle.
SUSAN CARLAND: And we have to put all of that in perspective.
In the 1930s Australia and the rest of the world endured a decade of depression.
After that, came the Second World War. Rationing, controls, sacrifice and self-denial
to save the life of the nation. To the generation who lived
through these years the Holden seemed to represent a turning point. It configured
the new age of prosperity and optimism.
BRUCE SCATES: And in that we see both paradox and
irony. The Holden symbolised an end to wartime austerity – ironically, that very war
made this machinery possible. Under the Curtin Labor government, Australia
had mobilised manpower and industry. In a matter of years an economy geared
primarily for primary production shifted. It shifted towards a manufacturing base.
Australia had to produce its own trucks, its own planes, its own guns, to fight that war,
and now that same technology was harnessed to produce the Holden.
SUSAN CARLAND: That’s not the only paradox embodied in the Holden. By the standards of computer-driven
automobiles today, this machinery seems simple enough, but really this car
embodied a whole web of complex contradictions.
On the one hand the Holden marketed itself as innovative, forward-looking,
the new face of 20th century industrialised Australia. But the name itself reminded
Australians of the world they’d left behind and an identity based more on the
bush than the modern metropolis of the city. Holden was the name of an old Australian business
and one that produced saddles for horses
and carriages for agricultural machinery. This may have been a 20th century car
produced with 20th century technology, yet that very name Holden expressed
yearning, nostalgia for a horse-drawn world, the frontier society of a hundred years earlier.
Other alternative names the builders mooted were the ‘Austral’, the ‘Emu’ and the ‘Melba’.
Maybe it’s just as well they settled on the homely ‘Holden’.
BRUCE SCATES: And what about that technology? Holden styled itself the first Australian car,
and government – government insisted that no more than ten per cent of parts be actually
imported from overseas. That meant building an automobile industry here in Australia.
SUSAN CARLAND: An Australian car, yes, but a company
owned in America. The full name of the firm was General Motors Holden.
GM's factory in Detroit designed the original Holden prototype. It was secretly shipped
to Australia and provided a model for every car to follow. So the Holden really
is a curious cultural amalgam, Australian and American at one and the same time,
a national symbol but a product of an increasingly international automotive industry.
And marketers took advantage of that. On the one hand they claimed this
car was built by Australians, for Australian conditions.
This particular Holden was put through its paces in Australian summers,
Australian winters, down rough country tracks and dusty and open country paddocks.
BRUCE SCATES: On the other hand, advertisers emphasised the record and the reliability
of the General Motors brand and, of course, the American know-how that built this car.
And like most symbols of modernity, this car
exuded glamour, choice, mobility – the carefree consumer power long associated with America.
SUSAN CARLAND: And that brings us to one final paradox we’d like to consider.
A Labor Prime Minister, Ben Chifley, welcomed this first Holden off the line,
and his Labor predecessor, John Curtin, had made the whole project possible.
Massive government investment, some two-and-a-half million pounds, subsidised the fledgling car industry.
This was essentially a socialist venture – Holden was a car for the people.
BRUCE SCATES: But really – really the Conservatives ,
the Menzies government – wrought the benefit of the Holden. And it’s beautifully captured in
a cartoon published for the very election campaign that brought Robert Menzies to power.
There’s Chifley, with that distinctive pipe,
driving a decrepit old jalopy. You can imagine it struggling up that hill,
its tank, as the cartoon suggests, spluttering dry on its rationed petrol.
Menzies, on the other hand, promises to take the country in the opposite direction –
to fewer taxes, smaller government. The spacious sedan Robert Menzies
is driving looks a little bit like our Holden – powerful, comfortable, the symbol
of a new individualistic and consumer-oriented society.
SUSAN CARLAND: And it’s interesting that the voter depicted in this cartoon is a woman – a young
attractive middle-class woman, at that. This was part of an electoral cohort
Menzies Liberal Party appealed to, housewives, the self-employed, small business men and women.
Menzies called them ‘The Forgotten People’.
They were the upwardly mobile, lower middle classes who Labor – with its focus on
union power – had too long neglected. The problem for the Chifley government was
that many traditional Labor voters had tired of the managed economy Labor represented.
The ‘Light on the Hill’, the socialist utopia Chifley promised, seemed
too far away and perhaps, with the Cold War chilling the political climate in
his country, more than a little frightening. Working-class Australia, too,
longed for that shiny, new Australia of affluence and opportunity.
BRUCE SCATES: Of course, there’s a gender politics to all of this. Menzies, the perfect gentleman, is about
to take the wheel. He represents the male breadwinner and provider whose hard work
and high wages could buy a car like that on hire-purchase.
The female figure reminds us that women’s proper sphere is the home. In the ideal nuclear family of
1950s Australia, men drove their cars to work. Women – women remained in their
comfortable, suburban homes raising a happy brood of children.
SUSAN CARLAND: Holden seemed part of the
‘Australian Way of Life’, a term you’ll still hear used today.
In 1950s Australia, there were growing rates of home ownership and car ownership.
Young family settled out in the suburbs; weekends were devoted to family life and
new rituals of leisure – that pleasant Sunday drive in the country first amongst them.
Suburban Australia was a place of predictability and conformity
but it also offered its own kind of dignity – comfortable, secure,
with a freedom from want unknown in past generations.
This wasn’t Ben Chifley’s ‘Light on the Hill’, but it signalled what historians
have called a ‘greater democracy of consumption’.
BRUCE SCATES: Australians still live, for the most part, in the suburbs. Although we idealise the bush,
suburban life really defines us as a people.
And the life of our cities and towns still revolves around cars like this one.
Australia has one of the most individualised transport systems in the world,
and the cost of that, in social and environmental terms, is higher than
anyone in the 1950s could ever have imagined.
SUSAN CARLAND: But the character of Australia's
suburbs is changing. 1950s Australia was built on the
back of post-war immigration. Indeed the workforce that built that car was
recruited from Germany, Yugoslavia and Latvia. These migrant groups created
communities of their own, communities that harboured very different values and
ideals to the Anglophile world Robert Menzies belonged to.
BRUCE SCATES: Suburban Australia has changed
and so too has the Holden. The relaxation of protective tariffs in
the 1980s exposed the Australian automobile industry to unprecedented
levels of competition from cheaper overseas models.
Holden, still styling itself Australia’s car, struggled to adapt, but increasingly this car looked
no different to American ‘Fords’ or Nissan ‘Hatchbacks.’
Once this Holden seemed new and glamorous. Today there’s nothing other
than a name to distinguish it from a dozen other cars on the market.
GMH’s Fishermans Bend plant, the factory that produced this car, shut down in 2015
and arguably that closed the door on a genuinely Australian automobile industry.
SUSAN CARLAND: Always a car to hold the road, Holden continued to fight for a market share
well into the 21st century. And one of its most catchy advertising campaigns
asserted against all evidence to the contrary, the car’s essentially Australian character –
‘Football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars’ – so the jingle went.
[Advertisment plays]
PRESENTER: Australia’s own car. Australia, what’s your favourite sport? AUDIENCE: Football!
PRESENTER: Snack? AUDIENCE: Pies! PRESENTER: Animal? AUDIENCE: Kangaroo!
PRESENTER: And, what’s your favourite car, Australia? AUDIENCE: Holden!
PRESENTER: Let me see, that’s football, meat pies kangaroos and Holden cars, huh? AUDIENCE: Right!
PRESENTER: Well, you sure sound like Australia to me. AUDIENCE: We are!
PRESENTER: Well then you better tell me again, coz I just might forget.
AUDIENCE SINGS: We love football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars.
Football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars.
PRESENTER: That's football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars.
AUDIENCE SINGS: Football and meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars.
PRESENTER: I think you better tell me again.
AUDIENCE SINGS: We love football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars.
PRESENTER: In case you’re wondering, this film is brought to you by football, meat pies,
kangaroos and Australia’s own car.
AUDIENCE SINGS: They go together underneath the Southern sky
football and meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars.
PRESENTER: Makes sense to me. AUDIENCE SINGS: Football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars.
BRUCE SCATES: And here we see a final irony. That same advertising campaign was a direct copy
of GM’s American jingle, ‘Baseball, hotdogs, apple pies and Chevrolet.’
SUSAN CARLAND: Holden may no longer be a defining feature of the ‘Australian Way of Life’,
but the footy sure is! And on the MCG, and in stadiums across the country,
you'll see a performance to outclass any Holden.
[Music]
BRUCE SCATES: If you’d like to learn more about the issues raised in this episode
why not catch ‘Susan Carland: In Conversation’.
This time, Susan’s talking to social commentator
Waleed Aly in the grandstand of the MCG.
[Music]