The Dream before the Dream: The 1956 Melbourne Olympics

The winner was... Melbourne? Australia's most European city had won its bid to host the Games of the XVI Olympiad by just a single vote over Buenos Aires, and as the opening ceremony drew closer the IOC's confidence in Australia hadn't grown. Disputes between state and federal governments over questions of funding had set back construction timetables markedly, and when IOC president Avery Brundage visited the Victorian capital 18 months before the Games were due to open, he expressed publicly his doubts that the city would be ready in time. Nothing ever changes...

And yet Melbourne was ready in time, and they did us proud. And more Australians than ever were able to enjoy the Games thanks to a new invention that had just made it to our shores.

It must be said, all Olympic posters of this era look remarkably fascist.

The Box
From late 1956, in the corners of living rooms across the country, there was a strange new device. For years its place had been occupied by the Wireless, around which the family had gathered to hear news about the war. But this was the 1950s, not the 1940s, and the old had been supplanted by the new. This box was about waist-high, shrouded in wood panelling – a real piece of furniture, in fact – and on the front, where for years had been only the tuner dial and AM/FM selector, there was a small glass screen. Television had come to Australia.

AWA TV manufactured in Australia in 1956. The Old Fart tells me his first TV was an AWA (Source: Powerhouse Collection)

Labor PM Ben Chifley had announced a government-backed foray into television immediately after the war, but his party had been booted from office before anything could come of it, leaving the idea to the tender mercies of Robert Menzies. Uneasy about the possible impact on society, Menzies did what conservatives always do, and stood athwart history yelling stop. He said to a visiting member of the BBC in 1952: "I hope this thing will not come to Australia in my term of office."

Given the sheer length of his term of office however, there was no avoiding it, and Menzies was forced to set up a royal commission into the idea in 1953. The commission recommended that the Television and Broadcasting Act 1942 be amended to allow commercial TV stations, operating along lines similar to those developed for radio. Naturally, the ideal deadline to have the network in place would be the upcoming Olympic Games in Melbourne: To broadcast the Games live around the world? That would be a real coup!

The first four commercial broadcast licences were handed out in 1955, all going to established newspaper firms. Channel Seven in Sydney went to a subsidiary of Fairfax (which owned the Sydney Morning Herald), while Channel Nine Sydney went to Frank Packer's The Daily Telegraph. Channel Seven Melbourne meanwhile was awarded to The Herald & Weekly Times Ltd, owners of The Herald and The Sun, while Channel Nine Melbourne went to a consortium that included The Argus and The Age. In effect, each major city got three channels – Channel Seven, Channel Nine and the ABC – and it would take time for TV to penetrate to more remote areas. Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia would have to wait until 1959, while Tasmania would not join in until 1960 (and as late as the early '80s, a cousin of mine quipped about our rural town having "compulsory television", since we only had two channels – Seven or the ABC – and you couldn't watch the ABC, because it was just news).

TCN 9 Sydney produced their first official broadcast on 16 September 1956, and audiences tuned in to see Bruce Gyngell, immaculately dressed in a dinner suit, utter the immortal words, "Good evening, and welcome to television." HSV 7 Melbourne followed on 4 November, while the ABC began transmitting from Sydney the following day. The phenomenon delighted so much that sales of TV sets boomed, and The Women's Weekly offered advice on how to rearrange living rooms to accommodate this new accessory.

So, how much do you think a new TV cost in 1956? Well, thanks to Trove, we have a nice, detailed breakdown of the costs, and the numbers are startling. The Argus forecast that it was going to cost somewhere in the region of £213 total (that's $8,660 in 2024 money!), of which £175 ($7,115) was for the box itself. To that you could add between £10 and £35 ($400-$1,400) for installation and aerial, and an extra £20-25 ($800-$1,000) any time you needed to replace a worn-out tube (which were promised to last either 6 months or 1,000 hours. The Argus warned that they were expected to need, "eight maintenance calls a year", which some firms were selling like insurance – an £18 premium (i.e. $730) would cover you for the year). And after all that, you still had to fork out another £5/5s ($215) for a U.K.-style TV licence, which would be introduced on 1 January 1957 and remain until it was abolished in late 1974. (Why? Because the cost of sending inspectors around to check everyone's living rooms cost more in wages than they were making back in fines. Apparently, people would dodge the fee by sticking the TV itself in a cupboard and hiding the aerial up the chimney. So all those people who torrent their media? Nothing ever changes.)

So like any new technology, not everyone could afford it, yet several publications predicted it would be quite fashionable to become the first household on your street to own one. Those who couldn't afford a TV of their own would often congregate outside shop windows to watch whatever was on. (Comment sections even contain evidence that some people considered this a date...!)

Source: Melbourne Remember When on Facebook

For many Australians, the Melbourne Olympics were their first taste of television ever, which is very fortunate given it almost didn't happen. All three stations – TCN 9 (Channel Nine), HSV 7 (Channel Seven) and ABN 2 (the ABC) – ended up televising the Games, but the issue of broadcast rights was not sorted out until a mere three days before the opening ceremony. The organisers claimed the rights had to be paid for, while the TV stations pushed hard for the Olympics to be classified as news, which they would be able to broadcast for free. Eventually it was agreed that the rights had to be paid for, and so Melbourne set an important precedent not only for subsequent games, but for televised sport in general.

Original Prankster
On 2 November, in the small Peloponnese town of Olympia, athlete Dionyssios Papathanassopoulos was handed a burning torch and began the first leg of the 1956 Olympic relay. He was the first of 350 Greek runners tasked with bringing the flame from Olympia to its immediate destination – slightly spoiling the romance, a Qantas airliner waiting on the tarmac in Athens. The logistics of getting to Australia meant that, of the more than twenty thousand kilometres the flame was about to travel, three-quarters of it would have to be done by air. As was the style at the time, Qantas flew the flame to Australia in a series of small hops, stopping over in Istanbul, Basrah, Karachi, Kolkata, Bangkok, Singapore and Jakarta. On 6 November, between Singapore and Jakarta, the Olympic flame crossed the equator and entered the southern hemisphere for the first time in history, before landing safely in the Northern Territory capital of Darwin. Here it was given to Tiwi basketball star Billy Larrakeyah for the short run to yet another waiting aircraft, this one an RAAF bomber.

The bomber crew brought the flame to the Queensland town of Cairns, where the relay proper began. The first runner was Con Verevis, a second-gen Australian of Greek parentage, a nod to the origin of the Games. He passed it to Anthony Mark, another well-known Indigenous sportsman from the Kowanyama community in western Cape York. The event was run with military precision, each man (and they were all men) required to complete his mile in under 6 minutes (necessary as the hexamine tablet used as fuel had only 15 minutes of life in it). Runners for the Kew-Burrell Creek section, for example, trained three nights a week at Taree Park (Johnny Martin Oval), carrying a dummy torch of the same weight as the real thing. "Some remember training in bare feet, while others tell of burning eyebrows and hair," Russell Saunders remembered for the Manning River Times. "It had to be held away from the body otherwise the sparks burnt the arm and clothing. Moreover, if you held it in front, smoke fumes billowed straight into your mouth!" 

Melbourne Olympic torch, minus its steel burner. (Source: City of Melbourne Collection)

The torches themselves had been designed by architect Ralph Lavers and, true to Australiana of this period, were essentially a copy of the ones created for London 1948. Unlike the modern day, where manufacturing as many torches as there are torchbearers is a trivial matter, there were only 110 Melbourne torches made, so each had to be reused many times over. As the runners finished their leg, they handed the spent torch to an attendant in the support truck (supplied by GM-H, naturally), who removed the spent fuel cannister, gave it a quick clean and refuelled it ready for its next use. For what it's worth, Holden had recognised the promotional opportunity and provided five new FEs to be used as support vehicles: Holden dealers along the route refuelled, serviced and cleaned them.

Day and night, the flame made its way down the east coast, its bearers menaced by heat and soaking rains, and one torch actually broke when it fell to the ground in Lismore. But the defining event of the relay didn't come until the flame reached Sydney on the morning of 18 November.

Here waited the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Pat Hills, who was due to receive the flame from cross-country champion Harry Dillon. After receiving the flame, Hills was to make a quick speech and then pass it on to another runner, Bert Button, to resume its journey to Melbourne. A crowd of 30,000 had lined the streets to witness the event, with the usual battery of photographers and journalists stood at the ready to record this moment in history.

Then at 9:30am a young man appeared, dressed in grey trousers and a white shirt rather than the official runner's gear, but he was carrying a torch. The crowd began to cheer: the boys in blue shepherded him toward the Lord Mayor and, although taken by surprise at the lad's early arrival, Hills accepted the torch and went straight to the podium to begin his speech.

It took Hills quite a while to realise what he'd actually been handed: by some accounts, he didn't notice until an aide stepped forward and whispered in his ear. To the horror of the organisers, what the Lord Mayor of Sydney was holding was actually a common chair leg, painted silver, with a plum jam tin on top! The flame was burning nothing more noble than a pair of underwear soaked in kerosene. This "Olympic torch" was a forgery, the young torchbearer an imposter. The mayor looked around for the culprit, but he'd already melted back into the crowd and disappeared.

Believed to be the only surviving photo of the incident.

To his credit, Hills regained his composure swiftly. "That was a trial run," he said. "Our friends from the university think things like this are funny. It was a hoax by somebody. I hope you are enjoying the joke." The crowd was not enjoying the joke, in fact, and they became so confused and unruly that the police escort had to clear a path for the real Harry Dillon a few minutes later.

The culprit turned out to be one Barry Larkin, a veterinary student from St. Johns College at Sydney University. He and his mates had dreamed up the prank as a protest against the concept of the torch relay itself, which had been invented by the Nazis for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Larkin himself was never meant to be the torchbearer, the original plan giving that job to another student dressed in a white shirt and shorts like the real runners (another student had dressed in an RAAF Reserve uniform to act as a fake military escort). When this other student had stepped into the street and begun running toward the venue, he elicited a few chortles from the crowd, but then he'd waved his arm a tad too dramatically and flung the burning undies out of their jam tin and onto the ground. Panicking he'd fled, forcing another of the pranksters to retrieve the device and hand it to Larkin, who was sent on his way with a firm boot to the rump.

Few people knew what Harry Dillon looked like, so when a young bloke had appeared carrying a burning torch, everyone had just assumed he was legit. Larkin later recalled in an interview:

The noise was quite staggering. There were flashes of photography. I felt very strange because I knew I was carrying a fake torch. The only thing I could think about was what do I do when I got there. I was helped by Pat Hills. I just turned around and walked back down the steps, through the crowd and onto a tram and back to college.

Larkin was never charged, and indeed remained largely unidentified until the late '90s. When he fronted for an exam the following morning, his fellow students gave him a standing ovation and, although he failed the exam ("That's another story..."), he eventually completed his studies and went on to have a successful career as a veterinary surgeon. The fake torch ended up in the hands of John Lawler, a man who'd been travelling with the relay in a car. He stored it under his bed for several years until, eventually, it was thrown away by his mother while she was tidying his house. Even so, the event had caused quite a stir: The Sydney Morning Herald said it, "set a new standard for pranks", while London's The Independent called it, "the greatest hoax in Olympic history". Personally, I'd say it bears mentioning in the same breath as, say, the Chaser boys getting a fake motorcade into APEC summit. Nothing. New. Under. The Sun.

Let the Games Begin
The main venue for the Games was the storied Melbourne Cricket Ground – already more than a century old and recently upgraded, with the Northern or Olympic Stand built to replace the old Grandstand, making it one of the greatest sporting venues in the world. 103,000 people piled in for the opening ceremony, bearing witness to the arrival of guests from a dizzying array of countries. As the hosts, Australia had entered the second-largest team in the Games, with 294 athletes ready to contest almost every event – almost as many athletes as we'd sent to the previous twelve Games combined, in fact. Only the United States had brought a bigger team than us, with 297, and we outnumbered even the 272 of their arch-rivals, the Soviet Union. At the other end of the scale, the prize for the smallest Olympic team was probably a three-way tie between Iceland, Hong Kong, and North Borneo, who'd sent just two athletes each (which makes it remarkable that Iceland would leave with a silver medal in the men's triple jump). North Borneo were in fact making their only Olympic appearance, as come 1963 they would be subsumed into the new state of Malaysia, while also on their first Olympics were tiny Fiji (with a proud team of four), and Liberia. Afghanistan meanwhile had sent twelve athletes, all of them part of a single field hockey team. Overall, there were more than 3,300 athletes marching in the opening ceremony, representing a globe-spanning 67 countries.

It could've been more, but nine teams had axes to grind and chose to stay home instead. Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Cambodia all boycotted in protest of the Suez Crisis (in which Australia had admittedly been quite complicit), while the Netherlands had managed to talk Spain, Liechtenstein and Switzerland into joining a boycott over the ongoing Soviet invasion of Hungary (although, in deference to their concerns, the Soviet team joined a number of other countries in competing under the Olympic flag rather than the hammer & sickle). Mao's mainland China, meanwhile, chose to withdraw after a dispute over whether it was they or Taiwan who had the right to compete as the "real" China. It was a lot of bad blood for what was supposed to be "the Friendly Games", and although it is true that athletes from both East and West had come together to compete as a single unified Germany, that too would be going away once the Berlin Wall nonsense started in a few years' time.

The Olympic flame was carried into the stadium by a 19-year-old Ron Clarke (future Olympic bronze medallist, world record holder and Gold Coast mayor), who bore it aloft in a special, more ornate version of the Olympic torch. The flame itself was similarly unique as, worried it might not "read" on those tiny suburban TV screens, the organisers had added a touch of magnesium to the burner to really make it pop. Clarke completed his lap of honour, lit the big cauldron that marked the formal start of the Games, and then discovered he'd actually been quite badly burned, with several holes singed in his t-shirt and nasty burns around his right arm and wrist. He remained sanguine, telling the Sydney Morning Herald: "It was terrific being out there. I did not feel the burns at all until afterwards."

And with that, the games of the XVI Olympiad officially began. You can watch the official film here, either in a single movie-length feature or as a series of 20-minute vignettes.

Jesse Owens, now middle-aged, still much fitter than you or me. (Source: Official Olympic film.)

The guest of honour (in a sense) was the legend himself, Jesse Owens. Twenty years before, in Berlin, Owens had made a mockery of the Nazi doctrine of racial supremacy by personally winning four gold medals (in the 100m sprint, long jump, 200m sprint and 4x100m relay – the first three on successive days. And yet, that was arguably only the the second most impressive feat of his athletic career...!). Indeed, his long jump gold had been won without breaking his own World Record, which in 1956 was still unbeaten. What's even more amazing is that it remained unbeaten when the Games were over: compatriot Gregory Bell took home the gold after a jump of 7.83 metres, but Owens' 8.13-metre record still loomed over it all. Not until Rome 1960 would Owens see his last record fall.

Watching it back, it's clear some things have changed significantly, while some have stayed remarkably the same. An event that hasn't changed much is your bog-standard 100 metre sprint. In Paris 2024, of course, it was won by Noah Lyles (and his tiara...) in a blistering 9.79 seconds. In Melbourne, it was won by the Texan, Bobby Morrow, in 10.5 seconds. That's... not as much improvement as I'd have expected, given seven decades of growing professionalisation, better nutrition, improvements in training, etc. I know the margins aren't going to be huge on such a short event, but it surprised me all the same. Almost like Mother Nature had already run a several-million-year programme to optimise the human beast for running...

Dumas certainly had style. (Source: The Geelong Advertiser)

The high jump, on the other hand, looked very different. Today we're used to seeing jumpers fling themselves over backwards, but in 1956 things weren't done that way. Everyone ran at the bar and leapt over it like primary schoolers at their first sports day, treating it like nothing more than an unusually high hurdle. The reason is that the backwards technique was yet to be popularised by Dick Fosbury, who would use it to win a gold in Mexico City 1968. Since then the technique has been known as the Fosbury Flop, but you'll note the operative word in the previous sentence was "popularised", not "invented". The move was known before 1968, but almost nobody used it because – as you'll see if you watch the footage – the landing pad back then wasn't a nice, thick, cushioning foam mattress, but a simple pile of sand. Doing the Fosbury Flop into a sandpit would probably be a short cut to a broken neck, so jumpers were restricted to methods that allowed them to land safely on their own two feet. In the end, the event came down to a contest between Australian wool grazier Charles "Chilla" Porter, and America's Charles Dumas. The bar eventually went too high for Chilla, who was unable to clear anything higher than 2.10 metres. Dumas managed a 2.12 and so took home the gold.

The darling of the Games was our "Golden Girl", Betty Cuthbert, who won both the women's 100m and 200m sprints before anchoring the 4x100m relay team. When it was all over, she returned to her ordinary suburban home with three gold medals and a new status as Australia's Sweetheart. In effect, Betty Cuthbert ran so that Cathy Freeman could... run even faster, I guess? Anyway, the senior member of the women's team, Shirley Strickland, managed two gold medals in her final Olympics, winning the 80m hurdles (reducing the World Record to 10.7 seconds along the way) and teaming up with Cuthbert for the 4x100m relay (again resetting the World Record, this time to 44.5 seconds) – ending her career with a formidable collection of three gold, one silver and three bronze medals.

Busting a gut: Cuthbert claims some more precious metal. (Source: The West Australian)

But the track and field medals were just a bonus. The real business was in the pool where, establishing a trend the world would recognise in coming decades, the Australians absolutely cleaned up. The venue for these events was Melbourne's Swimming and Diving Stadium – what is now known as AIA Vitality Centre – and it would see the Olympic debut of one of the sport's greatest exponents, Murray Rose, and a straight-up household name, one Dawn Fraser. Dame Dawn won gold in the 100m freestyle and 4x100m freestyle, plus a silver in the 400m freestyle, while Rose claimed a trio of golds in the 400m freestyle, 1,500m freestyle and 4x200m freestyle (not for nothing do they call it the Australian Crawl). Adding to the medal tally was David Theile, winner of the 100m backstroke; Jon Henricks, winner of the 100m freestyle; and Lorraine Crapp, who managed a 400m freestyle and 4x100m freestyle relay gold medal double (Though she never escaped the jokes: "Why does Dawn Fraser swim so fast?" my Pop never failed to ask. "Because she saw Lorraine Crapp in the pool!"). When everyone towelled off, Australia had walked off with 8 of a possible 13 gold medals in swimming – more than half of our final Olympic total.

Rose Gold. And at just 17, he had plenty left in the tank, too. (Source: Nine.com.au)

But of course, the biggest talking point of the Games was another swimming event entirely...

Concerning Hungarians
Though it might be over-generalising, I think it's fair to say the Hungarians are a very independent people. They'd spent the 19th Century levering themselves out of the decrepit Habsburg Empire, a process that had only been accelerated by the outbreak of the First World War, which for complicated reasons had then led to Hungary siding with the Nazis under their own fascist dictator, "Admiral" Miklós Horthy (and if you're wondering why I'm putting scare quotes around the word "admiral", well, have a quick look at Hungary on a map). In the immediate post-war world, however, their fascist past didn't do much to endear them to their new Soviet overlords, who after everything they'd been through were determined to keep Germany weak and divided, with a series of nice, compliant buffer states between themselves and Berlin.

By 1956 the war was over a decade in the past, people were beginning to move on with their lives, and – probably the most important point – Stalin himself was now dead (they made a whole movie about it). Filling his shoes was a new guy, Nikita Khrushchev, a peasant's peasant who was barely three years into his tenure as General Secretary of the Communist Party. As a result, 1956 saw a wave of unrest on the far side of the Iron Curtain. Protests in Poland, for example, managed to avoid civil war, and in fact resulted in concessions even as Soviet rule was reaffirmed, so a number of Hungarians felt the time might be right to tug at their chains and see how loose they might be.

They were mistaken. Khrushchev's response would've made Stalin proud, rolling in 30,000 Soviet troops and over a thousand tanks, crushing the uprising within two weeks. By the time the dust settled, the Soviet Union was firmly back in the driver's seat, and at least 2,500 Hungarians had been killed.

Busy training outside Budapest when the revolution began, the reigning Olympic champions heard the gunshots and saw the smoke rising above the city, but were kept in the dark about the true scale of what was happening. To keep them out of harm's way, they were moved to allied Czechoslovakia before making the journey to Australia, only discovering what had truly taken place after they arrived in Melbourne. Finding themselves matched against the Soviet team in the semi-final match on 6 December, the Hungarian team saw a chance to regain some national pride.

The atmosphere in the Swimming and Diving Centre was tense from the beginning. The Hungarians came in planning to provoke their opponents by insulting them in Russian. Said Hungarian star Ervin Zádor: "We had decided to try and make the Russians angry to distract them."

It worked. With the score at 2-0, Soviet player Boris Markarov punched Hungarian Antal Bolvári, triggering a series of brawls up and down the pool that took the referees some time to bring under control. If that had been the end of it, this still would've been a match for the record books, but the worst was yet to come.

The Hungarians were leading 4-0 when, in the final quarter, Valentin Prokopov suddenly planted one right on Ervin Zádor's face. The blow was so hard it drew blood, and images of Zádor beside the pool, blood streaming down his face, earned the game the moniker, "the Blood in the Water match". At the sight, the 5,000-strong crowd – most of them Hungarian expats – lost their minds and rushed poolside, aiming to get their hands on the Soviet team as soon as possible. The Victorian police were forced to intervene, and the officials called time on the game to give all athletes the chance to leave the venue alive. Since they'd been leading when the whistle blew, the Hungarians were declared the winners.

Zádor on his way to the infirmary. (Source: KGOU)

Luckily, even without the wounded Zádor, the Hungarians prevailed 2-1 in the final against Yugoslavia, and so earned gold for their second Olympics in a row. But it was a bittersweet victory. After quiet, intense discussions behind the scenes, 46 Hungarian athletes and coaches refused to return to their homeland, seeking political asylum in the west instead. At first they were spurned, but then Sports Illustrated got involved and convinced the U.S. to offer asylum to 34 of them, including water polo team members Miklós Martin, Antal Bolvári and, yes, Ervin Zádor. Another dozen went to other western countries, with featherweight wrestler Bálint Galántai even finding a home here in Australia.

The Final Accounting
The Soviets had the last laugh, though. They emerged from the Games with a grand total of 98 medals – 37 gold, 29 silver and 32 bronze – the highest medal count of any country in the world, including the United States' 74. It might not be official, but to a certain kind of person the country at the top of the medal table will always be considered to've "won" the Olympics, and in 1956 that was the United Soviet Socialist Republics. Australia was first behind the ideological titans, winning 35 medals in total (13 gold, 8 silver and 14 bronze)... although just behind us was none other than the Hungarian People's Republic, with 26.

The hostility of that water polo match was still on everyone's mind as the closing ceremony approached. The TV news at night was full of Cold War tensions, and after the ugliness of the Sèvres agreement, the Suez Crisis, Hungarian Revolution and the most violent water polo match of all time... well, it all rather undercut the idea that this was The Friendly Games.

Seeking a more hopeful note to end on, organising committee chair Kent Hughes gave the nod to a suggestion made by a 17-year-old Chinese-Australian named John Ian Wing, changing the format of the closing ceremony substantially. Rather than marching as separate teams behind their respective flags, Wing suggested that athletes be allowed to march freely as individuals, mixing and mingling as equal citizens of a single, unified world. Once again Melbourne had established a precedent, for not only did the organising committee adopt Wing’s suggestion, it has been the tradition at every Olympic Games since. Wing said:

During the march there will be only one nation. War, politics and nationality will be forgotten. What more could anyone want, if the whole world could be made as one nation?

What indeed.

Vultures Who Thirst for Blood and Oil: The 1956 Suez Crisis

This is one of those times the tangent proved a bigger timesink than the actual topic. I intended for the next post to cover the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, but I've found myself badly side-tracked by the reason several countries decided to boycott. The Suez Crisis is, however, more relevant than you might think, representing an excuse to dig into both the state of the British Empire, and the state of the oil industry, as they existed in 1956 – and the tale involves Australia a lot more than I expected.

Suez is the source of some of my favourite photos, of immense ships serenely gliding between the dunes. This one's the SS Oriana in 1959, colourised. (Source: Facebook.)

Okay, I'll Bite: What's a Suez Canal?
The Suez Canal is a 193km waterway dug through the dunes of Egypt, extending from Port Said (just east of the Nile delta), to the city of Suez at the tip of the Red Sea forefinger. It was the brainchild of Ferdinand de Lesseps, a Frenchman of Napoleon III's day, who'd had the bright idea to dig a canal linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and thus save ships the trouble of sailing all the way around Africa. To this end, in 1858 he'd founded the Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez, or Suez Canal Company, and financed it with an issue of nearly 400,000 shares.

200,000 of these shares were sold to private French investors at 500 francs apiece (extremely tricky to adjust for inflation, but at the time that was a labourer's wage for more or less an entire year). The other 177,000 shares went to the khedive (more or less, "viceroy" or local ruler) of Ottoman Egypt, Sa'id Pasha, in return for allowing the Suez Company to dig the Canal through his country and then collect tolls from it for the next 99 years. When Pasha hit financial troubles in 1875, however, he'd been forced to sell his shares to Disraeli's British government (with Victoria's blessing, of course). As the pre-eminent colonial power of the 19th Century, Britain's interest in the Canal had been intense, immediate, acute: it shaved 9,000km off the voyage to India, the jewel in the Imperial crown, so it's no surprise that from the moment it opened in 1869, two-thirds of all traffic through the Canal was British.

Battle of Tel El Kebir by Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville. Robert Brockway has suggested these 19th Century battle paintings are the inspiration behind Warhammer 40k official art, and I have to admit he might be onto something. (Source: Wikipedia.)

In 1882, Britain graciously stepped in to aid the khedive in putting down a revolt – and, while they were there, they decided they might as well secure the Canal. After that, there was a permanent British garrison defending it, which made Egypt a de facto British protectorate – even though it was still technically a province of the Ottoman Empire. The garrison stuck around through two World Wars, and was only dislodged by the burning desert winds of Arab nationalism. Frustrated with his playboy lifestyle (and his timidity at tossing the British out), Egypt's King Farouk was overthrown by a 1952 army coup led by one Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser. After a brief internal power struggle, Colonel Nasser became President Nasser, who signed an agreement with Churchill that would remove all British presence within two years i.e. by June 1956. For the first time in seven decades, there would be no British troops in Egypt to defend the Canal.

This was a concern, as in the immediate post-war world, the profitability of the Canal had risen sharply. In 1955, the toll was about eighty U.S. cents per ton (about $9.60 in 2025), so once you factored in a few sundry fees, it was about $6,200 ($74,000) to put through a common-or-garden cargo vessel. Not church change by any means, but the real game-changer was what those vessels were now carrying – oil from the Middle East, which was being freighted to Europe in ever-greater volumes. By the mid-1950s, total world oil production was around 12 million barrels per day, more than half of which was produced in the Middle East.

Oil had been a headache for Britain since the First World War, as unlike good old-fashioned Welsh coal, the Sceptred Isle had no reserves of its own (discovery of the North Sea basin was still decades in the future). To secure a supply, Sykes-Picot had dissected the emerging Middle East with the loving cruelty of a Cenobite, deliberately drawing the borders to divide every place against itself and ensure there could be no independent bases of power. Two of the states it created you might've heard of: One of them, an oil pipeline with a vestigial country attached, was ruled by the puppet King Faisal II, kept on the throne purely by the force of British arms; its name was Iraq. Another was its next-door neighbour Iran, where in 1953 the British and Americans had colluded to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in favour of a military dictator, the Shah Pahlavi. Mosaddegh's crime? Daring to speak of nationalising Iran's oil industry so the profits would flow back into Iran, rather than lining the bank accounts of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The resulting public outcry had been so great that AIOC had been forced to rebrand simply as "British Petroleum" – BP, for short. 

Britain had some form here, is what I'm saying, and with 70 percent of Britain's oil (not to mention 66 percent of Western Europe's), passing through the Canal, there was no such thing as an over-reaction, in their eyes, should it ever be threatened.

The Game Begins
Exactly what knocked over the first domino of the Suez Crisis varies depending on which account you read. Indy and the TimeGhost crew said it was Nasser spurning a U.S. arms deal in favour of a Soviet one, mostly because the Soviets didn't attach so many T's & C's to avoid an arms race with Israel. The Menzies Institute says it was Nasser's recognition of Mao's communist party as the legitimate government of China (the U.S. still favoured the Nationalists in Taiwan). Perhaps it was simply that de-colonisation naturally led former colonies to align with the Soviets, whose anti-imperialist rhetoric resonated strongly with the victims of colonial violence (never mind that the Soviet Union was itself a colonial power – you didn't have to go overseas to colonise, after all). 

Gamal Abdel Nasser aka. Mister President. (Source: Wikipedia.)

Either way, Egypt drifted a touch too close to the Soviet bloc, so on 19 July 1956, the Americans pulled the plug on a $250 million loan to finance the proposed Aswan Dam (a boon for irrigation, a source of hydroelectricity, and a revolution in Nile flood control). This was Nasser's pet project, so cancelling it threatened to undermine his entire regime: in response, he gave a speech in Alexandria on 26 July, in which he namedropped the Canal's creator, Ferdinand de Lesseps – a pre-arranged code word signalling his men to go ahead and seize the Canal. Nasser revoked the Suez Company's concession and transferred it to the state-owned Suez Canal Authority instead, aiming to use the tolls from the Canal to fund the dam. Alarm bells began ringing in London and Washington. The Suez Crisis had begun.

There Goes My Hero
For the next few months the Crisis took the form of a flurry of diplomacy, as world leaders scrambled to work out what (if anything) should be done. British Prime Minister Anthony Eden – a man who'd picked up an amphetamine habit following a botched operation in 1953, who now only slept five hours a night, and who happened to nurture a burning personal hatred for Nasser – immediately called for war. The French, dealing with an insurgency in Algeria that Nasser was funding and arming, agreed wholeheartedly. But John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of State, managed to instill a little bit of calm in the room, advancing a proposal that the Canal be declared international waters and administered by a new, multi-national body. The question was, who should bring the idea to Nasser? Ideally it would be someone with clout, someone with tact, and preferably someone from the Commonwealth to bolster the idea that Britain was willing to negotiate. The man chosen for the job was the long-serving Prime Minister of Australia, Robert Menzies.

Who looks enough like Clive Palmer in his official photos to make me wonder how inbred these toffs really are. (Source: Wikipedia.)

The Canal only shortened the voyage to Australia by 400 miles, but even so, 60 percent of our Anglo-focused trade passed through it, so you couldn't say we didn't have any skin in the game. And maritime trade was something Pig Iron Bob knew all about. Since we'd last run into him, Menzies had become a founding member of the shiny new Liberal Party which, confusingly for Americans, was actually the more conservative of Australia's two major parties. It makes more sense if you recall they meant "liberal" in an economic sense – that is, that they believed in laissez-faire capitalism rather than the quasi-socialism of wartime Labor. As Stephen Williams wrote in his 2018 article, Australian Politics for Beginners, Part one:

The Liberal Party was formed in 1944 from anti-Labor groups, with Robert Menzies as its champion.

It represents conservatives in general, but especially the wealthy and mercantile class. Since these people own the country, they think it is only fair that they run it. ...

The Liberals' economic agenda can be summarised as harking back to the good old days of the 1920s, when people knew their place. Business should be allowed to run government and therefore the country, while everyone else does what they are told. That, after all, is the natural order, as vouchsafed by the monarchy and the class system. Those who don't like the class system are, of course, socialists who would have us queueing up for our breakfast with ration cards...

Menzies' shadow looms long over his party, and over Australia in general. He was Prime Minister from 1949 clear through to 1966, partly because the Liberals seemed really good at managing the expanding post-war economy, and partly because Labor fractured into infighting, as the more fanatically anti-communist and Catholic wing walked out to form a splinter party. With such assistance, Menzies was able to lead his party to a record seven election victories in a row (to put that in perspective, try to imagine Mr Albanese remaining in office until 2039). Such a spectacular accomplishment doesn't exactly speak of a dullard, and yet his imminent mismanagement of Nasser makes me wonder if he was a broken clock who just happened to be right for the times. Today it's easy to mock his simping for the Queen with John Ford's famous verse, "I did but see her passing by, and yet I'll love her 'til I die." But consider what the Sydney Morning Herald wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of Lizzy's 1952 visit to our shores:

Royalty can have a strange effect on people who come into contact with it. It had an extraordinary effect on an estimated 7 million Australians who flocked to see the young Queen Elizabeth 50 years ago …The estimated figure was about 70 per cent of the Australian population of nearly 10 million. Nearly one million people were thought to have crowded Sydney's foreshores and streets when the Queen arrived on February 3, when the city's population was 1.8 million. About 150,000 crammed around Sydney Town Hall and neighbouring streets when she attended the Lord Mayor's Ball. A newspaper reported that 2000 collapsed in the crush.

So Menzies' painful Anglophilia and monarchism were no stumbling block for the Australia of 1956, and yet it's hard to deny that the ship of state steamed in circles while he had his hand on the tiller. He maintained a burning hatred for the working class in general and unions in particular, doing his best to overturn the industrialisation of the Chifley years and return to the wool-exporting economy of the 19th Century (and then importing the products of Britain's clapped-out industry). He tried to strangle the Snowy Mountains Scheme in the cradle, then claimed in his memoirs that it had been his baby all along. He offered Australia to the British when they needed a testing ground for their latest nuclear weapons (without even consulting his cabinet), condemning an unknowable number of us to slow death by cancer. He never hesitated to commit Australian troops (all conscripts in those days, remember) to die overseas in Imperial wars, and indeed had them on deployment at this very moment in Malaya. And perhaps most tellingly, First Nations people gained citizenship in 1948, then were included in the census in 1967, two dates which happen to lie just before and just after his time in office. I don't believe that's a coincidence.

This was the man who'd now been entrusted to meet with, and persuade, a brown man that he should turn his country's property over an an international consortium. A man who swore he couldn't let Nasser, "get away with such an act of brigandage". A man who wrote in his private diary, "These Gyppos are dangerous lot of backward adolescents, full of self-importance and basic ignorance." It turned out about as well as you'd expect. 

Menzies meets Nasser. Note the smiles: it was all downhill from here. (Source: Australian Financial Review.)

On 5 September, a five-country delegation, featuring the Ethiopian Foreign Minister, the Swedish Foreign Minister, the U.S. Deputy Under Secretary of State for Administration, and of course Menzies himself, was dispatched to Cairo. And at first it went surprisingly well. Two meetings lasting an hour and a half saw little progress, with Menzies telling the press, "So far I am doing all the talking and here we are." Indeed, according to Nasser's confidante and newspaper editor, Mohammed Hassanein Heikal, Menzies had proudly worked through his repertoire of impressions, including Winston Churchill, famed Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, and the South African statesman Jan Smuts – and, by all accounts, it worked. Nasser was amused, and started warming to the Australian buffoon he'd been forced to welcome into his office.

Unfortunately, the honeymoon period was short-lived. Menzies reported to his good friend Eden that Nasser was, "In some ways a likeable fellow but so far from being charming, he is rather gauche … I would say that he was a man of considerable but immature intelligence." In short, Menzies thought he was a bit of a yokel, someone who'd be easy to manipulate. He was mistaken. Two days after the meetings, Nasser received a rather pompous letter suggesting, in the tone of a schoolmaster dealing with a particularly dense schoolboy, "The dangerous tension now existing internationally could be relaxed and terms satisfactory to the user nations and entirely consistent with Egypt's proper dignity, independence and ownership." An irritated Nasser replied that, "An act of such a nature is both self-defeating and of a nature to generate friction, misunderstanding and continuous strife. It would be not the end, but the beginning of trouble."

Any hope of a negotiated settlement died shortly thereafter when, in a horrible display of foot-in-mouth disease, Menzies warned that it would in fact be Nasser's refusal of an international administration that would be the beginning of trouble. As Heikal observed:

Nasser immediately closed the files on the desk in front of him and said: "You are threatening me. Very well, I am finished. There will be no more discussions. It is all over."

The delegation rushed to apologise – Menzies included – but it was too late. According to Heikal, the President made his feelings very clear: "To tell me that my refusal to accept an international administration will be the beginning of real trouble is a threat and I will not negotiate under threat."

The "international control" idea was dead, but Dulles, its architect, merely shrugged: "I don't look unhappy, do I?" America's chilled-out attitude was totally explained by a single sentence in the opening paragraph of a 1978 paper by Bent Hansen and Khairy Tourk, titled The Profitability of the Suez Canal as a Private Enterprise, 1859-1956. That sentence noted bluntly: "American investment [in the Canal] would not have been profitable." Indeed, if oil prices were driven up by the closure of the Canal, then U.S. exports from California and Texas – around 300,000 barrels a day in this period – would only have become more valuable. It won't surprise you, then, that U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower had effectively cut off the delegation at the knees by publicly announcing there would be no military action to enforce compliance. They'd never had any leverage to begin with.

The Sinai War
The rest you probably know. Unable to go to war openly, Britain and France found a loophole – what if they intervened in a war that was already underway, instead? Say, a war between Egypt and the new state of Israel? The Israelis were ready to listen: skirmishes and nuisance-raids were already a semi-regular occurrence on their southern border, so they regarded a war with Egypt as more or less inevitable. If they could get it over with while they had strong Western allies, so much the better. So it was, that on 22 October 1956, French Prime Minister Guy Mollet, his Israeli counterpart David Ben-Gurion, and our old mate Anthony Eden all got together in the French town of Sèvres (halfway between Paris and Versailles) to hatch a plot. Israel would invade Sinai, France and Britain would cry out in horror and beg for a ceasefire, Israel would accept and, of course, Nasser would refuse. Once that happened, the Europeans would have the pretext they needed to invade Egypt proper, securing the Canal and removing Nasser from power.

Israeli armoured column in Sinai. (Source: History Central.)

Israel pulled off their part flawlessly, invading without any declaration of war on 29 October and then rapidly encircling Egyptian forces at the border – they'd learned the Wehrmacht's tricks well. Right on cue, Britain and France issued their pre-arranged ultimatum, calling for both sides to pull back to at least 10 miles from the Canal... only for there to be red faces all-round, as it was realised the Israelis were still 30 miles from the Canal. The cat was out of the bag, as the whole world realised at the same time that this had all been set up ahead of time – an impression that was confirmed when photocopies of the Sèvres agreement (which had been foolishly signed by Mollet and Ben-Gurion) began circulating publicly. But it was too late to change tack, so before long the British were landing the Parachute Regiment in Port Said, and the proper war began.

The result was instant, savage condemnation for France and Britain, especially from their alleged closest ally, the United States. Eisenhower was furious he hadn't been consulted about this, not least because they'd just embarrassed him in front of the Soviets. 24 October happened to be the day the Kremlin decided to respond to the Hungarian Revolution by parking a T-34 on every city block, which Eisenhower had condemned in the strongest terms – only for his allies to turn around and do pretty much the same thing five minutes later. After that kind of betrayal they were never going to have his support, and that had severe consequences down the line.

The larval form of the SAS: men of A Company, 3rd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment during the assault on El Gamil airfield, 5 Nov (Source: Imperial War Museum.)

Britain's finances, never in the best shape after 1941, immediately took a dive as panicked investors sold off their sterling. To counter this, the Treasury had dipped into their already-low cash reserves in order to buy them back, with the result that the Treasury lost £50 million in only a few days. The best way to counter that would've been some help from the Americans – another loan, a waiver on existing debts, anything – but Ike was in no mood. Far from sending the financial aid Eden had quietly counted on, Eisenhower actually threatened to crash the pound by selling off America's stash of British bonds (which, remember, would crash the Australian pound at the same time, as its value was pegged to the British pound).

Alongside the looming financial crisis was a matching oil crisis. Despite interference from Royal Navy fighters, the Egyptians scuttled the 320-foot, cement-laden freighter Aka (a former WWII LST) in the middle of the Canal near Ismailia. She was the first of 32 ships deliberately sunk to close the Canal – in effect, strategically Ever Given-ing it thirty-two times over. Europe was suddenly facing oil shortages as tankers from the Persian Gulf now had to travel all the way around the Cape of Good Hope, a journey of weeks. A CIA estimate guessed that 86 percent of western Europe's supply was now affected.

Scuttled ships block the Canal at Port Said. (Source: Times of Israel.)

The only other source was the U.S., but once again Ike was ruthless, placing both Britain and France under an oil embargo until they accepted a U.N.-brokered ceasefire. The run on the pound and the oil crisis compounded each other, the lack of oil throwing the economy into chaos, with no money in the bank to buy more. At last bowing to the pressure, Eden announced that Britain would accept the ceasefire starting at midnight on 7 November. He held out one last hope that British troops might remain in Port Said as a bargaining chip, but Eisenhower bent his arm until he agreed to a complete withdrawal. His gamble had failed. The Americans estimated that, even with emergency shipments from the U.S., Western Europe would see a deficit of 10-15 percent of its oil needs for the next few months at least, and Britain was forced into yet more fuel rationing that lasted from December 1956 until May 1957.

Aftermath
The Suez Crisis was a disaster for Britain, proving beyond all doubt that its days as a great power were over. Ruthless realpolitik and imperial greed didn't play too well when you no longer had the might to back it up. In the new, superpower-dominated Cold War world, Britain could no longer conduct its own foreign policy. Like the rest of NATO, it was now nothing more than an extension of the U.S., native auxiliaries to the Pax Americana. The debacle also cost Eden his job – not because of the public outcry, but because the strain led to a mental breakdown.

The big winners of Suez were the Israelis, who'd got to show off their chops, warning their hostile neighbours that they'd be no pushover in the event of war. They'd also conquered a lot of land, gaining them access to the Straits of Tiran (negating the fact that they could no longer use the Canal), and also the Gaza Strip, which certainly wouldn't lead to anything bad happening seventy years later. Funnily enough, the other big winner was Nasser. Sure, his armies had been soundly defeated, and all that expensive Soviet military aid had gone up in smoke, but the Egyptian people had stood behind him, and he'd emerged a hero to the developing world who'd stood firm in the face of colonial aggression. Best of all, the Canal reopened on 10 April 1957, and the tolls started being paid into the Egyptian treasury. Today, it costs about half a million to put a ship through the canal (though it varies wildly depending on tonnage, beam, draft, and whether or not you're coming from or heading into the Mediterranean, which requires extra cleaning). It generates about $5 billion in revenue for Egypt annually.

And Australia? Our Prime Minister had humiliated himself, with even his biggest fans agreeing the whole event was the low point of his career (though, unlike his friend Eden, his career did survive). It's impossible to be certain that he'd have committed Australian troops to the Suez campaign, but there's no reason to think he wouldn't have – he did it in Korea, he did it in Malaya, he declared war on Germany in 1939 without even getting Parliamentary approval (the only Prime Minister ever to do so), and he'd go on to do it for the Americans too, as the Vietnam War ramped up. But by far, the most minor, insignificant, well-deserved comeuppance from the whole affair came later in the month, as a handful of countries declined to send athletes to our Olympic Games in Melbourne.

Iron Within, Iron Without: The Holden FE

For some, following up the rugged simplicity of the 48-215 and iconic FJ would have presented a conundrum: where to go next? But for Holden, the assignment was all too clear. More of the same, if you please, but with a few more creature comforts and – dare we say it? – a touch more style?

(Aero)built in Australia
I've said before that Australian culture in the second half of the 20th Century was a unique mix of Europe (mostly Britain, but more and more of the Continent as post-war immigration ramped up) and the U.S., so it's somewhat appropriate that the twin starting points for Holden's third offering were the drawing boards at Opel and Chevrolet. Holden called their latest creation the FE – model year 1956, according to their "secret" model code system – hinting that, like a wizard, the car arrived precisely when it meant to. That was an achievement in itself, as the FE was more than just Holden's first new platform since 1948: given how heavily the '48 original had relied on homework from Detroit, it was arguably the first pukka Holden ever, and certainly the first that was truly modern.

The '53 Opel Kapitän: only tangentially related to the Holden and, for war-related reasons, actually much less advanced.

Most reviews of the FE start by pointing out that it was based on the second-gen Opel Kapitän, with the prototype disguised as a Kapitän during open-road testing. Famously, Opel even shipped dies for some of the body panels over to Australia for Holden's use. Dr John Wright, however, has pointed out that the FE's "Aerobilt" body actually owed little to Opel beyond those panels, and the structure underneath was far more modern than any Kapitän (West Germany was, after all, still rebuilding after the devastation of World War II). And Dr John earned the letters before his name writing a thesis on the history of Holden, which became the basis for his landmark book, Heart of the Lion. He literally wrote the book on this, so we'll treat him like someone who knows what he's talking about.

The core of the FE was another steel monocoque, at a time when plenty of car-makers still relied on chassis rails.

The Baby Boom was well underway, with the eldest of that troublesome generation now reaching their tenth birthdays, meaning interior space was an ever more urgent priority in family cars. Accordingly, Holden lengthened the FE's wheelbase from 103 to 105 inches, then paired it with a nice low transmission tunnel that wasted none of the created volume. This allowed all six passengers to sit comfortably rather than being forced to stretch out awkwardly, wedging shins under the seat in front. The roofline was also made high enough for the inevitable hat everyone wore when driving in those days. All of this forced the glasshouse area to grow by 40 percent, which provided plenty of all-round visibility, but left the C-pillars so feeble that early production models that happened to be sold into more remote areas found their rear screens popping out as the roof flexed more than anticipated. Extra bracing and double-skin structural parts were rushed through to address it.

Boot space was another huge selling point for a car, and here too form and function came together in a beautiful pas de deux. Fashions had moved toward squarer "shoebox" cars, which allowed Holden to take the boot out to encompass the rear wheel arches in a single stamping, lifting boot capacity by two cubic feet (a 10 percent increase). This also allowed the spare wheel to be stored upright on the passenger's side, where it could be accessed without emptying the entire boot (in an age when punctures were nearly as frequent as fuel stops, that was a perk not to be underestimated. Also, both the boot lid and bonnet were self-supporting on opening, a major quality-of-life upgrade not shared with most of its market rivals). Crucially, Holden stuck firmly by their minimum nine inches of ground clearance, and the design was restricted to short overhangs with a Land Rover-style wheel at each corner, necessary when Holdens were driven on roads that would require an SUV in later days (it's worth noting that the modern SUV hadn't really been invented yet. Things like the Willys Jeep and Maurice Wilks' original Land Rover drove like tractors in those days and were in no way considered passenger vehicles).

One of the FE prototypes used for on-road testing. Note the "Opel" and "Kapitän" badging.

This is not to say the car was without flaw, however, as there was a major one. "Fe" is of course the chemical symbol for iron, so it's almost poetic that the car's Achilles heel was the creeping cancer of rust. "Iron started as a rock," the saying goes, "so never forget that it wants to go back to being a rock." On this topic, Dr John Wright is unusually blunt:

Holden's anti-corrosion policy until well into the 1970s can be summed-up simply: there was none of any significance. The thinking was that if each Holden part was built of sufficient strength and thickness, the rest of the car would be worn out by the time it was rusted enough to present a problem. Given the road conditions, it was a race for any car on local roads to last longer than it took to rust out. The FE, it must be said, pushed that equation to the limit, as it was line ball in some cases whether the rust got there first.

In other words, the FE was a classic victim of Detroit's philosophy that cars were disposable consumer goods. Take a moment to pour one out for all the early Holdens left at the mercy of the rain...

This FE prototype survived by mounting a museum plinth.

While the body was a revolution, the hardware under the skin was sensibly carried over from the FJ, with only minor improvements. The expected increase in cubes had to wait as the Fishermans Bend engine plant was flat-out just keeping up with demand. For this generation the engine remained the familiar 132ci Grey straight-six, but the demand for more power could not be ignored, so it was fitted with bigger valves and the compression ratio had been bumped up from 6.5 to 6.8:1 (something that could only happen after Australia's fuel quality improved). This was achieved by losing "30 thou" from the head, but stronger pistons ensured the engine's service life was maintained. The end result was a lift in power from 45 to 53 kW, but you had to rev the Grey to 4,000rpm to access it (200 higher than the FJ), and few owners back then drove like that.

In truth, they didn't need to. Where the FJ had provided 135 Nm of torque at 2,000rpm, the FE served up 148 – ten percent more – at just 1,200rpm. In other words, maximum torque was available just 700rpm above idle, allowing the driver to round up sheep at 13 km/h, then accelerate smoothly to overtake on the Hume at 128 km/h, using only the third of their three gears. The non-sychronised first gear was really only used for standing starts, while second was there if you needed to burble around town or climb an especially steep hill (even if that meant the clutch suffered some amount of slip). This, again, goes a long way to explaining why Holden would drag their feet on adding an automatic gearbox to the range – for a long time to come, it just wouldn't be necessary, especially given the dodgy fuel economy of an auto. On that note, the tiny 9.5-gallon (43.2-litre) fuel tank was less than ideal in an era of long-distance travel and limited options for late-night fuel stops. Allegedly the FE offered 30mpg (9.1 litres per 100km), but that disappeared in a hurry with a full boot or trailer.

The engine bay might've been virtually identical to that on the FJ, but "no surprises" was far from a losing strategy in those days.

Steering feel was improved by swapping out the old worm-and-sector rack for a new, fully-sealed recirculating-ball design, as favoured by Detroit. Apart from reducing steering effort, it was outstanding at isolating road shock, no small consideration on Australia's rough roads. This was paired with a new front anti-roll bar as standard, added by Holden to counter the FJ's tendency to tail-happy oversteer. The sharper steering rack was countered, however, by a revised wheel-and-tyre combo. Holden had fitted the FE with wider 4.5-inch wheel rims, which were now 13 inches in diameter instead of 15. This allowed the fitment of higher-profile "balloon tyres", which came with the dual advantages of off-road performance and maintaining the FJ's 15-inch overall wheel diameter, allowing the carryover of the previous 3-on-the-tree gearbox... at the cost of extra sidewall flex and vague steering feel. It was a problem that wouldn't go away until Holden finally sorted out its sports sedan heritage in the late 1970s, but here in the mid-50s the bias toward off-roading was probably the right decision.

Other changes included replacing the old 6-volt electrics with a beefier 12-volt system, which necessitated a Lucas generator and voltage regulator. This meant stronger headlight beams (important with no shortage of roos on the road at night), and a quicker turnover on ignition. The wipers, however, remained vacuum-operated, meaning they slowed to a crawl if you put your foot down to overtake on the highway. The only real weak point in the mechanicals was that the radiator was too small: it was just about adequate when new, but any loss of capacity as the car aged would see the problems multiply in a hurry, and FE Holdens stranded at the side of the road with their bonnets up soon became a staple of hot summer days.

The interior had a fifties doo-wop pleasantness about it. Apparently, the number one single that year was Johnnie Ray's "Walking in the Rain", which fits the mood perfectly.

The new key-start ignition had four positions – Lock, Off, On and Start – which meant a Holden finally offered some basic level of thief-proofing, and although the change from floor-mounted to pendant-type pedals is often talked about, it probably didn't mean all that much beyond leaving more space for the feet on a long cruise. The dash was all-new, with a large centre-mounted radio speaker grille with decorative metal knobs, full-circle horn ring, relocated instruments and a larger glovebox featuring cup holder recesses in the lockable lid. Nasco options included reversing lights, windscreen washers, and a front screen demister. The workhorse Standard sedans, utes and panel vans all got ordinary PVC seat covers – only the tarted-up Specials scored the FJ's Elascofab (also a kind of PVC, but with a very grainy finish that was supposed to look like leather as used on the 48-215). This being the era of Mid-Century Modernism, when the prevailing belief was that we could improve on nature, the easily-cleaned and sun-resistant vinyl was viewed as an advance over the leather of yesteryear, which shrank and split in the Aussie sun before much time passed. With an awful lot more cars now on the road, the Special also came with indicators, with the rear blinker flashing the stop light. It was therefore one of the first Holdens to spare its driver from the horrific arm injuries that could result from the compulsory hand signals if you didn't have them.

Styling by Jetsons
When the "new-look" Holden made its first public appearance in Collins Street, Melbourne on 30 July 1956, crowds thronged for a glimpse. And no wonder: Holden was a part of GM, and at the head of GM Styling was the legend himself, Harley Earl. Earl was the man who made full-scale clay models and the concept car standard parts of the automotive design business, and the hallmarks of his designs were tailfins, chrome and bullet-shaped appendages (like brake lights and indicators). It was a design language meant to evoke the glamour of the jet fighter and the rocket – Cold War-chic, we might say? – and it was this design language that Holden had to incorporate into the FE.

The problem was, true to our British colonial origins, Holden's styling department at this time comprised of a bloke in a shed. The bloke was Horace Alfred "Alf" Payze (assisted by a team of talented Aussie draughtsmen); the shed was one of the small outbuildings dotted around Fishermans Bend. Payze was 43 and, like so many of his generation, had seen his career put on hold by the Second World War. But he'd emerged one of the few Australians with any experience in this field and, because sheet metal requires so much tooling to manufacture, forcing any new car's styling to be locked in very early in the design process, Payze began work on the FE barely three years after the original Holden had been launched back in 1948. His mission was to square the Detroit trend toward low, streamlined cars designed for the new American freeways with a very conservative local market that rejected anything that didn't have a function, or that would easily get damaged and fall off – and he had to do it without in any way lowering the ride height. To his credit, he absolutely nailed it.

The shape of inspiration. The one they all wanted, then as now, was the two-door Bel Air with V8 motor. It's easy to see where Payze got his ideas. (Source: Amazon.)

The shape that emerged looked, not coincidentally, like a scaled-down 1955 Chevrolet. Take a moment to drink in the details, however, and you'll soon realise that none of the Chev's actual features had been carried over: the FE was an interpretation of Harley Earl's styling cues, not a copy, filtered through Australia's more conservative (the unkind might say, less tacky) palate. Even the basic FE came with that shiny plunging radiator grille, chrome headlight surrounds and wrap-around bumpers, and the Special got you an extra strip along the front quarter panel and door, plus "Special" badging around the rear. It had taken real foresight to reckon where Australia would be by 1956, and it was by no means guaranteed that by the time the car actually went on sale the locals would be ready for this much chrome... but they were, so the car was an instant hit.

And since Holden's paint shop continued to lift their game, the FE launched with a new range of colours including Ocean Mist Green, Teal Blue, Lockhart Cream, and the not-at-all-PC Gypsy Red. If you really wanted to turn heads, Specials even came with two-tone options such as a pale green Ocean Mist body with darker Huron Green roof. The most common colours appear to've been Teal Blue, or Teal Blue with an Elk Blue roof, which may have accounted for about a third of all FEs produced, but we won't get into the arguments over that. Although Holden's nitro-cellulose Duco was pretty good for the time, these bright colours needed constant attention to keep shiny and would go chalky if left in the sun. 

There was no hero colour, to use the terminology of a later era, but there was a special advertisement in the 5 June 1956 edition of the Australian Women's Weekly. Even in those days, when gender roles were rigid and restrictive, few would've undertaken such a major purchase without consultation with their other half, so Holden sensibly recognised the value of advertising to women. In this case the slogan was, "More beauty for your money," and they chose to showcase it with an example finished in Moroccan Tan and Egret Ivory. Presumably Holden's marketing team thought this was the most striking combination, and after you've taken a gander at Cara Pearson's restored FE on Street Machine, it'll be hard to argue that they were wrong...

The Model Range
There were seven distinct models in the FE range: the Standard, Business and Specials sedans, the workhorse utility and, as of May 1957, the panel van, at last edging out FJ van production. That it was the sleekest van Australia had yet seen was far less important in 1957 than it would be in later eras – the day when panel vans would be bought by young adults (usually up to no good) was far in the future. In 1957 they were still being purchased as an entry-level dual-purpose family and work vehicle, so it was common for buyers to add side glass and a removable back seat.

Completing the range later in 1957 was the brand-new station wagon (known at the time as the "Station Sedan"), available in Standard or Special levels of trim. As good on a building site as it was on a weekend trip to the beach, the wagon was arguably the best compromise for the multitude of single-car families that made up the bulk of the population, and it boosted GM's market share to just under 50 percent of Australian car purchases, with Holdens accounting for 42.7 percent of that (compared to 33.8 percent the previous year).

The FE ute was even more devastating to Holden's rivals, taking Holden's share of the ute market from 36.3 percent in 1956 to 50.8 percent in 1957.

The price had risen to £1,142, but increases in the average worker's earning power meant that wasn't far shy of $45,000 in 2023 money, so even with the extra kit, in real terms the price had barely moved. Today it's easy to be cynical and wonder why anyone would pay so much for such an unimpressive machine, but it's important to remember that in 1956, this was a lot of car for the money. If you couldn't find a place on Holden's waiting list (and couldn't afford a Yank tank...), your only other option was a British misery box: the Austin A40, four-cylinder Vauxhall Wyvern and six-cylinder Velox, and the Standard Vanguard (named for HMS Vanguard – military names carried a lot of weight in those days) were all fairly popular, but all struggled to cope with Australia's heat and rough roads. Only the Volkswagen Beetle and Peugeot 403 rivalled the Holden for rugged reliability, and those had their own problems (the Beetle was too small to be a serious family car, while the 403 was a rival for the Holden only until you hooked up a caravan or trailer). Ford's entry-level offerings included slop like the pre-war A493A Anglia and 100E Prefect, assembled at Norlane in sedan, roadster and ute guises. Power, if you could call it that, came from a 1.2-litre side-valve four-pot producing just 27 kW. They weren't even competing in the same category as the Holden.

Simply put, there was nothing on the road in 1956 that looked this good, could take this much punishment, and yet retailed at such a low price. After selling "only" 290,000 cars in the previous eight years, Holden would manage to sell 155,161 FEs in its two years on the market (and it would've been more, if only they could've built more). And naturally, sales got another tickle when the FE was chosen to be the official relay escort vehicle for the biggest event of the year – the 1956 Olympic Games, held in the Victorian capital of Melbourne.

Rex Solomon carrying the Olympic torch between Johns River Hall and Holey Flat Bridge, south of Kew, NSW. (Source: Midcoaststories)