We’d fought in World War II. We’d sent Bradman and his Invincibles to destroy English cricket. We’d drawn up plans to tame the mighty Snowy River and electrify the nation.

But the cars on our roads came from the US and the UK: Ford, Chevrolet, Austin, Morris.

They were fine for the prairies and the new freeways, for hedged lanes and touring the Cotswolds.

But they weren’t enough for us.

We should make an Australian car

All that pent-up energy of the Great Depression and World War II needed release.

We had the steel and we had the skills. It was time to become the great industrial nation we were always meant to be.

This Australian car, perhaps the Melba, the Austral or the Boomerang, would be our own car and it would be “built for Australian conditions”.

That was a marketing phrase but it worked because it was true.

In the late 1940s, barely 10 miles out of the capital cities (we were still measuring things imperially then as we still thought of ourselves as part of the Empire), you could be driving your Holden 48-215 (known later as the FX) on unsealed roads or just as bad, roads that were sealed but could only take one car in one direction at a time.

Roads could only take one car in any direction at one time. (Photo: National Film and Sound Archive)

This meant as a car approached, you swung half of your vehicle off the bitumen and onto the gravel alongside until you’d passed one another at which point you would swing your car back up on to the sealed bit.

Great for the suspension.

Unsealed if maintained might actually have been better, but of course they soon corrugated, often had huge unseen potholes, were terrible in the wet and filled the car with dust in the dry.

A tinnie with tyres

There was no power steering or disc brakes, so FX and its more-or-less identical successor, the FJ, handled like a tinnie with tyres.

And there was distance.

In the US, president Franklin D Roosevelt rolled out roads, but here we bounced down old stock routes and coach tracks to visit Aunty Ethel and Uncle Ted in our very own Australian car, perhaps a squat new FC in the late 1950s, and they’d be hours away.

We loved a drive: “We’re off for a Sunday drive.”

This “was” recreation: Drive to a scenic spot. Spread a picnic blanket and bring out some of the new plastic plates and cups. Pour tea from a thermos and eat some sandwiches. Then drive back.

Dad, it was always Dad who looked after the car, might check the oil and the water in the FB when he returned home.

Then give its modern fins and curves a loving wash and polish before parking it overnight in the garage.

Were you a Holden family or a Ford family?

Ford responded to all this affection for our very own car with the Falcon, (built for Australian conditions), and a rivalry began.

There were Ford families and Holden families and you would no more change your football team than change your brand allegiance.

The Commodore was once Australia’s best-selling car for 15 consecutive years. (Photo: State Library of South Australia)

Chrysler came Down Under with its Valiants, made here with some Australian parts and British Leyland couldn’t believe that the Yanks were so conclusively winning this trade war that they mounted an ill-fated attempt with the Tasman, the Kimberley and the automotive punchline the P76.

But this golden age of car manufacturing and national identification with Australian cars was dominated by EJ Holdens, Kingswoods and Commodores and the Ford Falcon.

Although both Holden and Ford were clearly owned by US companies, we were a big enough market to demand our own models.

It was economic to make them here.

Governments would subsidise the factories, it was not lost on Ben Chifley in 1948 that a manufacturing industry that could make a car or a ute could probably be retooled to make a ship or sub should push turn to warlike shove again.

All gone.

Football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars

Today, cars are made from global bits and shipped in and I’m not sure we feel quite the same passion for a Hyundai as we did for a Holden.

And when we need material, we buy into a transnational deal making a jet for many nations.

If you consider the jingle “Football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars”, itself adapted from an ad for Chevrolet, not one of its elements has quite the same meaning that it did when John Laws voiced this for the 1976 Kingswood.

The Holden. Built for Australian conditions that no longer exist.

– ABC