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)

Toward a Solarpunk Future

Something different to kick off 2025. Doug Muder of The Weekly Sift recently commented that one of the things that's gone wrong in recent decades is that the Left no longer has a utopian vision. "The communist vision collapsed with the Soviet Union," he said, "and I don’t know anybody who wants to revive it." Dreaming up a progressive utopia sounded like a challenge, and it might be nice to spend an hour or two imagining a positive future for once, so here is one. It's not actual prognostication so much as wishlisting (with added snark), but that's what I've got right now. You may or may not enjoy reading it, but I certainly enjoyed writing it.

Welcome to the future. It is the year... well, never mind exactly which year it is. Far enough into the future that you have adult descendants who've never met you, I'll say that much.

Today we celebrate the start-up of our first cold fusion power plant. The technology was a bitch to get working, but it was worth the decades it took and the trillions invested. It's not quite Free Energy Forever™, but it's infinitely better than what we've had – almost literally. You see, only most of us are celebrating the fusion plant starting up: The rest (a small minority) are popping corks because this means we can finally take the last fission plant offline.

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Yes, nuclear power did come to Australia, but it took a few goes before the legislation passed. To their credit, the voters back then bargained with their leaders pretty hard. It wasn't enough just to have a new, zero-carbon source of household electricity – the solar boom was already well on the way to taking care of that – we needed a major infrastructure overhaul, one conducted with an eye on the future. We needed that power to bring us things like carbon-neutral steel foundries, desalination plants, intensive recycling and high-speed rail (both freight and passenger. Oil is now waaay too expensive for air travel to be anything but a novelty for the super-rich now, a bit like commercial space travel in your day. How the hell were budget airlines ever a thing?!).

Then there was the question of where to put them. The big problem with nuclear power plants isn't the risk that they go Chernobyl (even in the 20th Century, we could engineer for that), it's what to do with the fuel after it's finished powering the reactor. Spent reactor fuel is radiotoxic on a timeline that just about maximises the inconvenience to future generations, about 10,000 years or so. That's too long to trust most materials on a shifting, geologically active Earth, but short enough that dosages can shred your double helix. So what we needed was a national sacrifice zone, a vast slice of land that was already poisoned, and one that already had plenty of access to water. And of course, once we framed it that way, the solution was obvious: Cotton farms! Years later and billions over budget (of course), the first Australian nuclear plant opened and was connected to the grid. And today, that first historic batch of enriched uranium pellets are still out there, encased in glass, about 0.01 percent of the way through their first half-life...

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It cost us a lot, but the plants did valuable service. As I said, one of the earliest perks was high-speed rail. Australia is one of the most train-able countries in the world (pun intended), with just a handful of major cities to link up. A double-track high-speed rail corridor between them was really the absolute minimum a civilised country could expect, so after expansions to The Ghan and the Indian-Pacific, it was just a matter of re-routing and upgrading the 19th Century shitshow that existed between the cities of the south-east. Once that was done (with similar levels of work done on the Inland Rail freight lines), we were in business. Everything else was easily moved with hydrogen fuel-cell trucks and cars.

Oh yeah, everything not running off an overhead wire is hydrogen now. You might think it would've been batteries, but no, batteries were never going to be viable on the kind of scales we're working on. A battery is a heavy lump of rare-earths that cost a fortune, they were never going to compete with a simple hollow tank once the solar got cheap enough. Once two-thirds of our power was renewable, it was suddenly viable to apply the electrodes to seawater by the tonne – especially with a nuclear power plant ready to step in if the sky clouded over and the price of electricity rose too high.

Cheap electricity also made massive desalination plants viable, and desalination made farming viable in a lot of places it hadn't been before. That said, plenty of farming is done within the cities as well, grown hyper-efficiently under magenta LEDs that only give the plants the wavelengths they need. Their water is cycled through fish farms to ensure they get the nutrients they need (so weird that plants grow better with fish and poultry manure, almost as if they're still adapting to mammals). Often synthetic fish, too. Synthetic meat is a major source of protein today and it's... fine, honestly. Real meat is still better, but it's expensive – think Kobe beef vs chuck steak in your time – and a lot of meat product in the old days involved feeding the inedible parts of the animal into a mincer anyway. For those applications synthetic meat long ago proved adequate, but the industry's real killer app came when they branched out and became an ethical source of lion and Galapagos tortoise. What, you've never tasted either of those? Ha!

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It didn't really matter that every litre of desalinated water created another litre of double-salted water, because we had a place we could drain it all – Lake Eyre. If you're thinking, "Wait, wouldn't that have an enormous environmental impact?" you're not wrong, it's just that that train left the station decades ago. Thanks to sea level rise, Lake Eyre is backfilling from the Southern Ocean anyway. Environmental impact? You don't know the half of it.

We missed the cotton farms only briefly, but before long we were all looking stylish and sexy in a new natural fibre: Hemp. Hemp used less water than cotton, and it was available because all drugs are legal now. I mean, of course they are. Ages ago we struck a new bargain with the pharmaceutical giants: They sold us the life-saving medications we needed at a fixed percentage over cost, and in return they were allowed to make bank from recreational drugs instead. It made sense, right? Most of the so-called "horrors of drugs" were actually the horrors of prohibition, of not knowing how much of what exactly was in tonight's uppers, downers, poppers and zingers. Once they were made in a clean, regulated factory with a known dose printed on the package, the OD rate dropped like a stone. To zero? No, of course not, no more than that other legal, legacy drug – alcohol. But it was a hell of a lot lower than before, and we got a better medical system out of it on the side. And of course, a few edgelords maintained the black market stuff was better, but hey what do you do?

The other half of reforming the medical system was to give nurses and pharmacists a lot more of the burden of clinic duty, of diagnosing sniffles and prescribing (from a strictly limited set of) medications. Doctors – real, honest-to-God medical doctors – are really just for emergencies now. And of course, if you're truly desperate there are diagnosis machines as well, but nobody uses them if they don't have to. Nobody trusts them.

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In fact, increasing mechanisation made some things weirdly cheap by your standards (and other things weirdly expensive. It's hard to explain). Nearly all jobs are service jobs now, but basic necessities are so cheap you don't need to work too much anyway, and with a little training it's just about possible to live Marx's dream, "...where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow..." Just about.

Indeed, with machines making the basic necessities cheap, it led to what people in your time might call an "Etsy-fication" of the economy. After your two or three days at the service job,  most people were free to work on their passions, and for many this meant cranking a potter's wheel, or blowing glass, or sewing clothes or just... making stuff, purely because they could. Sometimes other people buy what they produce, because it's nice to own something made by human hands, but that's not really the point anymore. And needless to say, the explosion in the arts of the last few decades has been staggering. Everyone is media-literate on a university level nowadays, so sampling all the capital-A Art out there in just a single lifetime is like filling a syringe at the seaside.

And if you think that sounds impossible, that surely work would expand to fill the time available to do it... well, the factory workers of the industrial revolution thought so too, until they wrangled the eight-hour workday out of their masters. Hell, the very concept of the weekend had to be passed down as the Word of God itself before subsistence farmers of the bronze age would accept it. The social contract is always up for renewal, oldtimer. The economy is our creation, our servant, not our master: If it's not doing what we need it to do, we can change it.

At least there's no shortage of people to work, thanks to our latest wave of immigration from the slowly-submerging Pacific island nations. Brown Australians huff and complain that we need to do something about our open borders, but the children and grandchildren of immigrants always do.

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I say "brown Australians" but... You're going to find this really hard to swallow, but it's more or less impossible to say what colour anyone is anymore. I mean, obviously you can just look, but you can't rely on that when it's liable to change whenever the mood strikes them. Body mods and gene-hacking made racism, sexism and transphobia academic (albeit over decades), outside a few hardcore religious holdouts. When skin colour and gender are more or less optional, what does it matter anyway? There was even a trend for Blaschko stripes a few years ago, but the younger generation is always looking to scandalise.

Far more importantly, we put that gene-hacking tech to work creating new species to replace the ones lost to the Sixth Extinction. (Again, if you're concerned about new invasive species, I remind you that ship sailed before either of us was born.) It started with relatively simple things, like new bees for plants that had lost their pollinators, but gradually the scientists allowed themselves more leeway to experiment. (Not every experiment worked, of course, but it's a lot easier to build fail-safes into an invented species than a wild one.) Some of the jewellish serpents and glittering butterflies they've come up with are so beautiful it breaks your heart, and Great Barrier Reef 2.0 has to be seen to be believed.

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At which point, I suppose, we have to address the elephant in the room. Yes, we live in the age of Climate Change. The atmosphere has warmed by 3 degrees Celcius, which is more than you guys were hoping, but less than you feared. Sea levels have risen by about a metre, but that's not the real problem. What the dopier among you never seemed to grasp was that 3 degrees of warming doesn't mean what used to be a 40-degree summer's day is now a 43-degree day. It means the ocean of air over our heads, 500 million square kilometres wide and 400 kilometres deep, contains an extra 3 degrees of energy. That's an enormous amount of energy, and it comes out in weird and violent ways. Never mind the waves that might be lapping at the walls of your beach house, all buildings and infrastructure today has to be built tough – bunkerised, you might say – to withstand the tropical cyclones or surprise pop-up hailstorms that regularly blow through Sydney and Wollongong...

That was colossally expensive, of course, but the hard work's mostly been done now, so I won't get hung up on the natural disasters – mostly because they don't really bother us. The olds are always surprised how sanguine we are about this stuff, but why wouldn't we be? We don't remember a time when droughts only lasted a few years and box jellyfish didn't lurk off Bondi. The harder part is actually keeping the voting public focused on doing the hard work of returning to a world none of us remember. Carbon capture remains tough, after all: It's a fundamental violation of the Laws of Thermodynamics, as our engineers never fail to remind us. (See? This is why nobody likes engineers. You give them something important to do, and they tell you it can't be done and then feel smug because they knew that and you didn't. I understand they weren't any better in your time.) That makes it difficult, but not impossible. The job of reefing the Earth back on the straight 'n' narrow continues, year upon year. It took us two centuries to knock it out of alignment, so it'll probably take at least that long to fix it again.

Source: Pinterest

But we can do it. And in the end, all of it – the genetic engineering, the hydro farming, the shiny new fusion power plant – is in service of our ultimate goal, that of making humanity a spacefaring species. What, you think we can't? The technology mightn't exist to reach Alpha Centauri yet, sure, but colonies closer to home are... well, I won't give too much away. It's dangerous to know too many specifics about the future. Let's just say it's always impossible until it's done, and life on Earth is rapidly approximating life on board a space station anyway, so we might as well. But every day the planet is a little bit more cleansed, a little bit closer to equilibrium, and every day the stars are a little bit less far away. The path before us still isn't easy, but every day I get up and do my part – my teensy, tiny, barely consequential part – and I live in hope. Plenty of humans have had less.