The Forties: Holden at War

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By 1938 it had become clear that GM's Marrickville assembly in Sydney was too small to keep up with the ever-growing demand. General Motors-Holden's managing director Lawrence Hartnett decided to repeat the trick that had worked so well at Fishermans Bend, and replace it with a larger, more modern factory in a new location. Marrickville was sold in 1939 (and subsequently used by the Department of Civil Aviation), while for the location of their new plant GM-H chose another piece of sandy wasteland, a fourteen-hectare site at 128 Bunnerong Road, Pagewood, right at the intersection of Heffron and Maroubra Bay Roads.¹

Work commenced in February 1939, with the foundation stone laid by NSW Premier Sir Bertram Stevens on 1 August (just four days before he was ousted by his treasurer, Alexander Mair). A plaque commemorating the day recorded that, "From the foundation of New South Wales in 1788 this land was unoccupied until purchased by Crown Grant by General Motors Holden Limited as the site for these works." Which was an astonishing bit of cheek given that, like the rest of the Sydney basin, the area was traditionally home to the Eora nation. The area certainly hadn't been unoccupied before 1788, but between the smallpox² and the bayonets, they'd long since been rendered a non-factor.³

Pagewood on the day of its opening, February 1940 (Source: Primotipo).

The plant was designed and built by the GM-H Construction department, and by mid-October almost 1,100 tonnes of steel had been erected to create the traditional sawtooth factory roof, enclosing an area of 26,300 square metres – roughly 6½ acres. That made it only slightly smaller than Fishermans Bend, which might've seemed like overkill for a "mere" satellite assembly, but it was destined to serve a significantly larger market.⁴ Like the Bend, it too scored an understated Art Deco admin building, this time constructed with a distinctive clock tower.

Pig Iron Bob and Larry Hartnett in the back of a Vauxhall Wyvern Caleche, having just opened GM-H's new Sydney assembly (Source: Primotipo).

The first trial production car (a Pontiac sedan) was completed on 19 January 1940, and the site was officially opened by Prime Minister Robert Menzies on 15 February. For a brief period the plant assembled Vauxhall, Chevrolet, Pontiac and Bedford vehicles, before the world situation began to bite. Because of course, by the time the plant opened, the Sword of Damocles had fallen yet again and plunged the world back into monstrous conflict.

The War No-One Was Ready For
On 1 September 1939, Hitler invaded the sovereign nation of Poland and kicked off World War II in Europe. As a loyal outpost of the Empire, Australia's declaration of war came only 45 minutes after Britain's, and within three days we'd fired our first shots of the war. By coincidence, they were fired by the same 6-pounder gun⁵ at Fort Nepean that had fired our first shots of the First World War, and for pretty much the same reason. On 5 August 1914, the German cargo vessel Pfalz had attempted to flee the port of Melbourne and, after she was stopped, she was commandeered by the Australian government for use as a troopship, while her crew was taken into custody. On 4 September 1939, however, the event was rather less glorious: There were red faces all-round when the culprit turned out to be the SS Woniora, an Australian ship which had simply tried to set sail without filing the appropriate paperwork. Thankfully, this was the last time the battery ever fired in anger.

Nevertheless, with the war underway the Australian government found itself with fewer than 3,000 people in uniform ready to fight. They were backed up by another 80,000 part-time reservists of the Citizen Military Forces, also known as the Militia, but by law these personnel could not be deployed outside Australian territory. Sending forces to Europe would require establishing a whole new formation, so the Menzies government put out a call for 20,000 volunteers to join the 2nd Australian Imperial Force – basically, the 6th Infantry Division, plus a bunch of remora units to provide medical support, signals, artillery, and so on.

From the National Archives of Australia. (Added 30 Apr 2024)

One of those volunteers was a 21-year-old tearaway from the sleepy town of Orbost in East Gippsland, Victoria – Henry Leslie "Harry" Firth. Allegedly, Firth read Mein Kampf at an early age and developed a healthy disgust for the ideology contained therein, prompting him to sign up for 2AIF when the call went out. He enlisted as a dispatch rider with the Signal corps because it would allow him to indulge his passion for motorcycles, but he couldn't have realised what the war would really cost him. He and 2AIF got their first taste of action in Operation Compass, where the Commonwealth forces pushed Mussolini's 10th Army out of British-held Egypt and back into Libya, a drive of more than 1,200 kilometres in only two months... but he also spoke of throwing his bike off the road and diving into a ditch to avoid strafing from a Messerschmitt Bf 109.

Firth continued to fulfill his messenger duties in the doomed and largely symbolic defence of Greece, where they were, "chased out of Greece by the Luftwaffe", according to his unpublished autobiography. He evacuated from mainland Greece aboard a 25,000-tonne liner that was subsequently torpedoed, forcing him to jump 25 feet onto the deck of a rescuing Royal Navy destroyer – then watched in horror as another destroyer was sunk by German aircraft shortly after, an event which afflicted him with nightmares for the rest of his life.⁶ But that at least meant he never made it to Crete, where the 19th Brigade tried and failed to hold out against the infamous Fallschirmjäger attack of May 1941 – following which, the leftover bits of 6th Division were finally pulled back to Egypt for a badly-needed rest and refit. Like a lot of veterans, Firth remained fairly tight-lipped about his wartime experiences, to the point that many of his acquaintances were surprised to learn of them at his funeral in 2014 – but once informed, they admitted the signs of PTSD were clear to see.

Army trainees on a route march near Seymour, Victoria, 1940 (Source: Virtual War Memorial)

On the home front, it really wasn't until the fall of France and the Dunkirk evacuation that the war became an emergency for the Dominions. Even into the 1960s, many Australians referred to Britain as "home", even though they'd never been there, so it wasn't until Blighty herself was threatened that things finally kicked into overdrive. Having made no previous effort to put the Australian economy on a war footing, in late 1940 the Menzies government at last established what it called the Department of Munitions, with Essington Lewis (Chief Executive of BHP) as Fabricator Director-General. About himself, Lewis assembled Harold Clapp (head of Victorian Railways), W.J. Smith (head of Australian Consolidated Industries), F.G. Thorpe of MacPhersons Ltd (today a maker of household items, but back then Australia's main source of machine tools), an out-of-office Labor member and banking expert named Joseph Benedict "Ben" Chifley... and our old friend, Lawrence Hartnett of GM-H. Hartnett was placed in charge of Ordnance, and turned the plants at Fishermans Bend, Woodville and Pagewood over to wartime production.

Normally this would've signalled a return to the proud Holden tradition of war profiteering, but that was almost impossible this time around. Mindful of their experience in the First World War, Australia's leadership wrote all their wartime supply contracts on a cost-plus basis – and then deployed a crack team of accountants to ensure prices remained fair for all parties. Going further, by mid-1942 the swelling workforce⁷ and real wage growth versus shortages for basic goods raised fears of runaway inflation, which Canberra countered via strict rationing and price controls. Tea was now limited to ½lb every 5 weeks; sugar, to 2lb per fortnight; butter, only 1lb per fortnight (and rationing on butter and tea would remain in place until 1950).

Ration books circa 1944 (Source: Australian War Memorial)

Working within this system, GM-H Chairman Edward Holden could only say: "We are in a State of War when profits are a secondary consideration compared with the effectiveness of the Company's effort in playing its part in the War activities in Australia." By early 1941, Woodville was almost totally committed to wartime production, with a payroll swollen by almost 20 percent compared to peacetime – and that was despite 750 of Holden's own employees running off to enlist. Women were hired to work the factory floor and, in 1942, they took a famous propaganda photo of former laundress Joyce Breedin assembling aircraft, describing her as, "an expert in setting brads ready for applying the skin to the wing frame of a Wackett trainer."

The sheer variety of stuff produced by GM-H during this period is dizzying. At the tail end of the war (or very shortly after it), the company released a booklet detailing their wartime production, which thankfully is available as a PDF on the Holden Retiree's Club, because it makes for fascinating reading. It starts with vehicles, of course – Chevrolet blitz trucks of every kind, aircraft trailers, fire tenders, water wagons, ambulances and mobile surgical facilities – but from there it branches out into areas you mightn't have expected, like bridging pontoons, collapsible boats and haversacks. Pagewood was turned over to the manufacture of Frigidaire refrigeration units, which were combined with Chevrolet and Bedford truck chassis to create refrigerated transport vehicles for the army to bring fresh meat to the troops. At different times, the Sydney plant also manufactured De Havilland Mosquito aircraft wings and 25-pounder artillery pieces, which would probably look familiar if you saw one, as there's a good chance there's one out the front of your local RSL right now.

Ordnance QF 25-pounder artillery piece. (Source: State Library of South Australia)

On that note, Holden were also a co-ordinating contractor for the manufacture of 2-pounder anti-tank guns. The Ordnance QF 2-pounder fired a 40mm armour-piercing shell, which was a pretty standard in the early years of the war, and would remain adequate in the Pacific theatre until the very end thanks to the lighter construction of Japanese tanks (most notably the iconic Type 95 Ha-Go). 892 of them left the Woodville factory during the war, and the Holden booklet was very proud to point out that the device could be made entirely within Australia – no mean feat when the telescopic sights required a lens-grinding industry as well. A refurbished example made waves recently when it changed hands in 2022, for a cool $45,000 – thankfully, to a museum in Gippsland where it can be viewed by the public.

Most significantly of all, however, Fishermans Bend stepped up to build the De Havilland Gipsy Major engine, using components from fifty-seven upstream suppliers. This engine powered a number of light aircraft of the period (most notably the famous Tiger Moth), and was the first time ever that internal combustion engines had been mass-produced in Australia. It seems Holden found the experience edifying, as by the end of the war the Bend also took on the task of building Gray Marine diesel engines, while on a smaller scale Birkenhead was given over to the manufacture of torpedoes.

A War for Oil
World War II has been called, "The First War for Oil", and with good reason. It was concern over fuel shortages that forced Hitler to start the war before he was ready, and rapidly diminishing fuel reserves that forced the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 – the Third Reich had to capture the oil fields of the Caucasus, or die.

For Imperial Japan, the link between oil shortages and war was even more direct. Ongoing military operations in China were using up some 11,000 tonnes of crude a day, with up to 95 percent of it coming from what was then the world's greatest oil exporter – the United States. When FDR turned off the taps in 1941, unwilling to countenance the atrocities in China, the Japanese leadership found themselves in a desperate situation – find a new source of fuel, or else lose everything they'd conquered so far.

Within their reach, however, were the orphaned colonies of Southeast Asia, with an abundance of raw materials like nickel, tin, bauxite, rubber, and fertile farmland for food production. Even better, the European powers that claimed to own them were all down for the count: Was occupied France really going to send troops halfway around the world to defend Indochina? Could a desperate Britain really spare the divisions to hold Burma, Rabaul and Singapore? Juiciest of all, what was the exiled government of the Netherlands really going to do if someone stepped in to claim the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies? Even in pre-war days they'd virtually been a legacy colony, a relic of a military power that had faded centuries before, and now the country was occupied by the Nazis with a government exiled to London. To the Japanese leadership, it must have seemed like there was nothing to lose and absolutely everything to gain.

The prize: The oil basins of the Dutch East Indies. (Source: Mande Blog)

The catch was that to bring all that oil back to the home islands, they'd have to sail the tankers right past the island chain of the Philippines – a de facto colony of the United States. So if they were going to do this, they'd first have to neutralise the U.S. Pacific fleet, then sitting at anchor in Pearl Harbor...

The resulting campaign was breathtaking in its audacity. Landings in Malaya started only hours after Pearl Harbor, and they were followed up with more in the Philippines, in Burma, in Rabaul and of course, in the Dutch East Indies. The highly-motivated Japanese infantry proved a holy terror to the hard-pressed Allies, but in truth the Commonwealth forces weren't capable of serious resistance. The fall of France had triggered a mass wave of volunteering, allowing the Australian Army to raise three more infantry divisions – the 7th, 8th and 9th – but they were then sent thousands of kilometres away to fight on other fronts. The 9th Division was sent to relieve 2AIF in North Africa, with a few of its diggers destined to be become the famed Rats of Tobruk. The 7th Division was dispatched to team up with the 6th in defeating Vichy French forces in Syria and Lebanon. That left just the 8th Division available to serve in the Pacific, and even then it was broken up into smaller units and spread out across the various British possessions in the region, as part of the so-called "Singapore strategy".

A famous image of the Prince of Wales and Repulse coming under air attack. (Source: Wikipedia)

If there was a moment when Australia's course shifted permanently, then it was somewhere in the desperate days of 1942. The first shock came when Task Force Z – the battleship HMS Prince Of Wales, the battlecruiser HMS Repulse, and four destroyers of the Royal Navy – steamed out to oppose Japanese landings in Malaya, was attacked by Zeroes and Betty bombers, and sank within half an hour. The second came when General Yamashita, the "Tiger of Malaya", put his army on bicycles and attacked Singapore from the rear, bringing about the largest capitulation in British history. Mother England had failed us, and 8th Division had been all but eliminated as a fighting force in a matter of weeks, spending the rest of the war in POW camps like the hell on Earth that was Changi – an experience from which a third would never return.

Despite what you've heard, however, there was never a serious intention to invade Australia – the idea was brought up once, and just as quickly dismissed as impossible.⁹ Gōshū, "the Awesome Land", was just too vast, too hostile and too well-defended for the already-overstretched Japanese military to conquer. Instead, they sought to stave off any thoughts of liberating the Indies via strategic bombing of Darwin and Broome, and then use their navy to drive a wedge between us and the Americans, simultaneously cutting Australia off from resupply and denying the U.S. a convenient staging post.

That resulted in the indecisive Battle of the Coral Sea and, in July 1942, a campaign in the mountainous jungles of New Guinea: the Kokoda Trail. The Japanese force that landed at Buna-Gona was dubbed the South Seas Detachment, a brigade-sized force drawn from the 55th Division, which recruited mostly from Shikoku. Their mission was to seize Port Moresby and the airfield at Milne Bay to give the torpedo-bombers a solid base from which to operate, and all they had to overcome was an ad hoc collection of Militia and garrison forces famously derided as "Chocos", or chocolate soldiers, because they were expected to melt in the heat of combat. Despite the legend, the Japanese never outnumbered us⁸, but they were veterans of Burma and had the edge in heavy equipment like mountain guns. We had nothing heavier than the trusty Bren.

What we did have was the help of some 32,000 native Papuans from a head-spinning diversity of language and ethnic groups¹⁰, who we simply called the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels. Whether volunteered or conscripted, it was they who did the hard work of ferrying supplies and stretchering out the wounded, making the campaign possible. (Source: Tasmanian Times)

And yet, the diggers held. As I've said before, a thing doesn't have to be true to be influential, and the fact that Imperial Japan had no plans to invade Australia doesn't mean the fear of invasion wasn't white-hot at this time. As far as the Chocos were concerned, this was a fight to save Australia – and save it they did, outlasting the Empire of the Rising Sun in a pitiless campaign that saw more men drop from disease than ever did from enemy fire. Not for nothing did the Japanese soldiers say: "Heaven is Java, Hell is Burma, but you never come back alive from New Guinea."

And in the course of the Kokoda Campaign, almost without noticing it, Australia turned its most significant corner since white settlement: We finally spat out the British teat and grew up. Since Federation, Australians had done plenty of fighting, but hitherto it had always been at Britain's behest, attached to British formations, in pursuit of British strategic goals. Those days were now largely over. As of Kokoda, Australia was setting its own agenda, and the country that emerged from the nightmare of war to witness the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was quietly but deeply changed. To safeguard its future, Australia now recognised that it would have to break its dependence on Britain, become industrialised, "Populate or Perish", and build a defence industry capable of holding its own against any and all regional rivals. And of course, this being the 20th Century, a thriving motor industry had to be an integral part of that.

Ben Chifley visits troops in Rabaul, shortly after VJ Day. (Source: Inside Story)

By October 1944, as it became clear the Americans would win the war in the Pacific, the Australian share market returned to its 1937 high – a startling vote of confidence given rationing and price controls were still damping down growth. Suits in both Canberra and Fishermans Bend began to consider their post-war strategy, when industry would rotate back to the production of consumer goods. As it happened, General Motors-Holden's was uniquely well-placed to build Australia its first home-grown motor car: They had a proven capability for mass-producing bodies, chassis and now engines from raw steel and glass... and they had more basic advantages as well. In late September of 1940, the Federal election had seen Ben Chifley win back his old seat of Macquarie in central NSW. To avoid a conflict of interest he'd resigned from his seat on the Department of Munitions board, and less than a year later Robert Menzies was ousted from the Prime Ministership in a no-confidence vote – the first of a series of dominoes that resulted, by 1945, in Chifley attaining the office instead. The Australian government wanted a motor industry, and the man now at the top now had Lawrence Hartnett's phone number...

¹ I can't say for sure, but I think the site was chosen for its rail connection. We have some old maps on our walls, and one of them shows a rail spur passing right by the area down to Botany Bay, though it's on such a large scale it's hard to be sure. Nevertheless, I don't think you'd build a new industrial facility anywhere in the world in 1939 without solid freight rail connections.

² I'm not saying the smallpox was deliberate, but coming as it did after colonisation of the Americas, where smallpox blankets were a deliberate strategy, you certainly can't argue that they didn't know.

³ I expected that, given they lived right at the point colonisation began, the Eora surely would've been the most obliterated of all the First Nations. In fact, it turns out they have living descendants today, and we know a surprising amount about their language and culture. Which is not to say they haven't suffered terribly from colonisation, but there's a lot more left than I would have assumed.

⁴ According to one source, at the time Victoria had a population of just over 1.8 million, whereas NSW was more like 2.7 million. The same source lists the Northern Territory's population as just 5,985, which seemed impossibly low until I remembered Indigenous people wouldn't be counted in the census for another 28 years.

⁵ Albeit with a different barrel. Today both barrels are preserved and on display.

⁶ If the story is true, Firth could be describing the SS Slamat disaster, where survivors of the Slamat were rescued by the Royal Navy destroyers HMS Wryneck and HMS Diamond, only for both destroyers to be sunk by Messerschmitts and Stukas soon after. Of the roughly 500 soldiers Slamat embarked, only 8 survived.

⁷ Unemployment, which was at 8.76 percent at the outbreak of war, dropped to just 0.95 percent by 1943, its lowest-ever level.

⁸ Indeed, by the end of the campaign we heavily outnumbered them, but in the opening phase both sides probably started out at near-parity.

⁹ My grandmother (the same one mentioned in the previous post) never failed to mention that the Japanese had money printed ready for use after the conquest of Australia. This is a half-truth: The money certainly existed, but it was intended for use in the other British colonies after their incorporation into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, not in Australia.

¹⁰ For what it's worth, most of the fighting took place in Goilanan and Binandere-speaking areas.

Under New Management: Holden in the Thirties

I wasn't planning to get bogged down in the politics, but this was too interesting to leave out, and it sort of follows on from mentioning the Sydney Harbour Bridge in my previous post. It occurred to me that the Great Depression was taken as an invitation on an embossed card by both the far-Left and far-Right all around the world, so what about Australia? Did we get in on that action while all the cool kids were doing it? This being Australia, the answer turned out to be, "Yes, but..."

Friendlyjordies called him, "The Greatest Australian of All Time". Statistically, the greatest Australian of all time probably lived and died long before white settlement... but he was pretty neat.

The usual course of events was that, with laissez-faire capitalism down for the count, and the pre-Stalin Soviet Union seemingly going from strength to strength, communists around the world started getting stroppy. This in turn triggered a far-Right backlash¹ from Great War veterans and middle-class professionals who feared their country was going Red. While there was a Communist Party of Australia, founded in 1920 and featuring members like Adela Pankhurst (daughter of famed British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst), they never really gained a foothold in this country, so party membership and vote share remained tiny. No, the Right's real boogyman in this country was NSW Premier Jack Lang, who was then a member of the Labor Party and regarded as a major threat. What kind of policies could the Big Fella have espoused to elicit such vitriol? From his Wikipedia page:

During his first term as Premier, Lang carried out many social programmes, including state pensions for widowed mothers with dependent children under fourteen, a universal and mandatory system of workers' compensation for death, illness and injury incurred on the job, funded by premiums levied on employers, the abolition of student fees in state-run high schools and improvements to various welfare schemes such as child endowment (which Lang's government had introduced). Various laws were introduced providing for improvements in the accommodation of rural workers, changes in the industrial arbitration system, and a 44-hour workweek. ...

Lang established universal suffrage in local government elections – previously only those who owned real estate in a city, municipality or shire could vote in that area's local council elections. His government also passed legislation to allow women to sit in the upper house of the New South Wales Parliament in 1926. This was the first government to do so in the British Empire and three years before ... London would grant the same privilege to women throughout the Empire.

Which is not to say he was a saint – he was an avid supporter of the White Australia Policy, for example – but for most people he crossed the Rubicon when he tried to dismiss the Upper House of NSW, the Legislative Council. He attempted such a thing because he claimed it was un-democratic – which at the time it was, functioning less like the Senate in Canberra and more like the House of Lords in London, with lifetime Peerage for those selected by the Premier. Taking advantage, Lang packed the Council with 25 members of his own choosing so the body could vote to dissolve itself: The motion failed by a single vote and, deciding this man was a bit too radical for their tastes, the voters kicked him out of office soon after.

Come the Great Depression, however, the newly-impoverished knew what was good for them and Lang was brought back in a landslide. Soon NSW was running bigger deficits than the rest of the country combined and, fearing they were witnessing the rise of the tyrant, a group calling themselves the New Guard rose up to oppose him – the first and largest fascist organisation in Australia, founded by Great War veteran Eric Campbell. The group claimed a whopping 50,000 members at its peak – a terrifying number when there were fewer than 4,000 police in the state – and featured celebrity members like former North Sydney mayor Hubert Primrose, and aviation pioneer Charles Kingsford Smith. Most New Guard members however were returned servicemen like Campbell, and under his leadership they broke strikes, disrupted "communist" meetings and, yes, attacked members of the Labor Party – standard Brownshirt stuff. But then, at the opening ceremony for the new Sydney Harbour Bridge, the group made its real mark on history...

Before Lang could cut the ribbon, a certain Francis de Groot, formerly a captain of the 15th Hussars² but lately a New Guardsman, spurred his horse forward and slashed the ribbon with his sword, declaring the bridge open in Lang's despite³. De Groot wasn't supposed to be there, but by borrowing a horse and putting on his old uniform, he'd blended in with the troop of NSW Lancers well enough that no-one asked questions. He was swiftly arrested and the ceremony carried on anyway, but the headlines had been made.

I've heard about this incident about a dozen times over my life, but only in the most recent retellings is it mentioned that de Groot was a member of a fascist paramilitary – if you didn't know better you could mistake him for a common protester, or even some sort of loveable larrikin. Thankfully, the New Guard rapidly broke up once Jack Lang was dismissed from office and, taking the hint, Eric Campbell went on to found a political party instead. He called it the Centre Party which, given he'd first consulted with Nazi diplomat Joachim von Ribbentrop and Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists (and father of Max – there's your motorsport connection), is kind of a misnomer.⁴ Australians being Australians, however, in the subsequent 1935 election the Communist Party got just 1.5 percent of the vote; the Centre Party didn't even manage half of that, with 0.6 percent.

TVtropes once pointed out that Australians solve problems slowly and with a minimum of physical violence. There are times when I am profoundly grateful for that.

Trouble in Paradise
Things were similarly divided within the headquarters of GM-H. No matter how management might promise otherwise, a corporate merger always results in two people competing for each job, and the pressure is on when there's a mortgage on the line. Within the offices of 169 City Road, Melbourne – formerly home of General Motors Australia Ltd, now base of operations for General Motors-Holden's Ltd – the backstabbing was exacerbated by a clash of cultures between Australian and American ways of doing business.

Case in point, they'd tried to stretch the top crown across two heads, making Augustin N. "Gus" Lawrence (the former head of GM Australia) and Edward Holden (his opposite number at Holden's) joint managing directors, with Edward also serving as chairman. That was never going to work. As far back as 1929, then-GM Australia head Innes Randolph had famously complained: "Amazing people these Australians. They just won't do as they're told." Holden's had always developed the vehicle to suit the local market, which was why they'd risen to the top of the local industry, but it took a bit more time and, crucially, a bit more money than just assembling whatever shovelware GM had shipped over. The Americans by contrast were all trained in the Chicago school of business, and would insist on a carbon copy of the original. Even in good times, deviating from Plan and Budget is viewed as a personal betrayal by upper management: In the midst of the Great Depression, it was probably something to settle with pistols at dawn.

When the infighting got too much, Edward Holden appealed to our old friend James D. Mooney, head of the General Motors Export Corporation, to swing an axe. The alterations to the personnel roster were sharp and dramatic: Gus Lawrence was kicked upstairs, given a regional directorship of Australian and South African operations, and most of the former GMA technical men went with him. Edward Holden fared only a touch better, Mooney deciding he should be chairman only, and bringing in someone new to take on the role of managing director, someone who'd already displayed adaptability in the face of colonial conditions – one Laurence J. Hartnett.

Here caught in a rare moment behind his desk. (Source: ABC.net.au)

Hartnett was fond of telling this story and, to put it gently, he wasn't shy about making himself the main character. Nevertheless, no-one could dispute that he had an enormous effect on the direction the company would take in the coming decades. He'd been born in 1898, to a middle-class family in Woking, and had initially attended Epsom College with the aim of becoming a doctor. He left at age 16 to pursue a mechanical direction instead, joining Vickers Ltd as an apprentice – the same Vickers whose heavy machine gun would soon become the terror of the Western Front. In March 1918 he finally enlisted, joining the Royal Naval College in Greenwich to become a pilot, only for the war to end before he could fly a single mission.

With the fighting over, in 1919 he embarked on his first business venture, purchasing a small South London concern that specialised in identifying war widows whose husbands had left motor cars up on blocks before going off to France, buying up said motor cars and then refurbishing them for sale. It worked for a while, but in 1921 the bubble burst and the company folded. Undaunted, Hartnett instead accepted a position as an automotive engineer with Guthrie & Co., an outfit busy administering a number of rubber plantations in south-east Asia, while also taking responsibility for importing tea, alcohol and motor vehicles into the region. The catch was the job meant relocating to Singapore, but that wasn't so bad given the region was booming, as worldwide demand for rubber made certain people in the right places very rich. 

Rubber tapping in Malaya. Twenty years later, the effects of British rule would see the region become Australia's dry run for Vietnam... (Source: Economic History Malaya)

Upon disembarking on the island fortress, Hartnett was immediately put in charge of Guthrie & Co's automotive division on Grange Road, which put him in touch with General Motors for the first time. Guthrie had obtained the local franchise for Buick the previous February, and Hartnett was now employed assembling and distributing their cars to dealers throughout the region (with Hartnett himself handling the Singapore dealership, and speculating in rubber futures as a sideline).

Such was Hartnett's success that, after three years at Guthrie, Mooney offered him a position as head of the General Motors Export Company's operations in south-east Asia – a position in which he excelled. Hartnett was now on the ladder, and the only way was up: By 1927 he'd been appointed to General Motors Nørdiska in Stockholm, and then in 1929 he returned to Blighty as export director of Vauxhall. In 1930 he was sent on an extensive tour of South Africa, New Zealand and Australia to gather intel on what would make for a successful export model, with Vauxhall's subsequent VX and VY Cadets tricked out according to what Hartnett had learned. Now he'd been summoned to put his talents and experience to work turning the Australian outpost around.

Thankfully, just the fact that he was British and not American made him more acceptable to the locals, and in 1934 he became managing director of GM-H, with a mandate to, "Make it profitable or close it down" – not the last time we'd hear those words. Fortunately, Hartnett understood the resourceful nature of the Australian operation and had a certain respect for it, saying: "The economies achieved by Holden's at Woodville put them, in many ways, years ahead of the rest of the world in manufacturing techniques. The resourcefulness and initiative of the Australians in this industry is beyond praise."

Hartnett began an overhaul of GM-H, sacking executives as needed and placing the dealers on a more stable footing. Agreements between the dealer network and the company, previously renewed annually, were rewritten so that they remained in perpetuity provided certain sales numbers were met. He also put his personal charm to work schmoozing in the halls of power, making friends with Labor Prime Minister Joseph Lyons to ensure the tariffs that kept Holden competitive remained in place (even then, it was known that if either party scrapped the tariffs, Holden was doomed).

Hartnett (far right), Lyons (centre) and someone with a real job, Nov 1936. (Source: Port Places)

 

The Sloper
The victory of the Australian faction within GM-H created space for innovation, and the rewards for that came in 1935 with the debut of a unique new body style. Holden's called it the "All-Enclosed Coupe", but it's known to most petrolheads by a much more descriptive name – the Sloper.

Press image of the "Sloper"-bodied 1935 Chevrolet Standard coupé.

Aimed at the travelling businessman, the Sloper was the forerunner of the modern three-door hatchback. The process began when GM shipped over the chassis and mechanicals for one of their Chevrolet, Pontiac or Oldsmobile "coops", ready to be dressed in a Holden's body. As we know, however, Holden's had a habit of modifying the design to suit local conditions, so rather than go with the classic bootlegger-chic three-box design (with or without rumble seats – remember those?), Holden's brought the roofline down to meet the rear bumper in a single long, clean curve – a "slope", if you will. By thus enclosing the boot and cabin together as a single space, and fitting a folding rear seat, they created a lot more weather-proof volume for kids or cargo, and the front and rear windows could also be cracked open for instant flow-through ventilation. There was also the cost-cutting benefit of needing to stamp out just one steel panel instead of two – albeit an unusually large one, but more on that in a moment... 

Compare the pair: The outline of the previous year's Oldsmobile shows what a difference the Sloper body style really made. (Both images via Five Starr Photos on Flickr).

If it all sounds suspiciously like GM's "Albanita" experimental – itself a response to Chrysler's "Airflow" – you're not all that wrong. Holden's were the Leibniz to Chrysler's Newton, that's all. The tyranny of distance left the Australians entirely unaware of the experimental new models in the U.S., so Holden's had simply forged ahead with what they thought was a really good idea. And crucially, unlike the Americans, the Australian version worked: By employing their deep institutional savvy with wood, Holden's were able to construct a body strong enough to take all the punishment Albanita could not, while avoiding the expensive tooling that ultimately sank the Airflow. Production is estimated to've run to around 7,300 all-up, but compared to just 212 for the Airflow – especially given the vast resources available to Chrysler – that was a bonanza. In fact, that year GM-H employed some 7,000 people drawing £1.25 million in wages, to produce 23,129 motor bodies for a net profit of £650,000 (about $77 million in 2023) – all in all, not a bad referendum on Hartnett's leadership.

The Bend
But the gears were always turning. The industry was putting less and less wood in its vehicles every year, but so far none had dared make an all-metal car. The reason was simply that no-one had a steel press big enough to manufacture the "turret" (i.e. the roof panel) – none, that is, except Woodville. With their Sloper experience, they were the obvious choice when, in 1937, Plymouth became the first brand in Australia to cross the threshold and put an all-steel car up for sale. They were able to do so because Holden's had geared up for the new model by installing a giant new steel press at Woodville, a piece of machinery so vast it had been inaugurated by PM Lyons. Rather than laboriously fashioning some two hundred individual pieces of timber, the new Plymouth merely required Holden's to stamp out the four major panels, then spot-weld them together. The savings in time and effort were more than enough to pay for the new steel press.⁵

(Source: Shannons Club)

It was another feather in GM-H's cap, but the Plymouth highlighted a looming problem – the car industry was moving away from fitting separate bodies to chassis in favour of integrated mass-production that saw a complete vehicle roll off the production line, ready for sale. Once the industry made the transition, Holden's would cease to be a true manufacturer and would become just another assembler of Chevrolets built for the streets of Manhattan. If Hartnett really wanted to push for, "A wholly Australian car," it might be now or never.

Hartnett often spun the story as if the idea of GM-H building a uniquely Australian model was his alone. In fact, he was pushing against an open door. Under the leadership of company chairman and president Alfred P. Sloan Jr, General Motors was busy building up its subsidiaries and encouraging them to develop vehicles suited to their various local markets. Opel was the go-to example: Mooney had long been explaining to the board that the Chevrolet cost 75 percent more in Europe, where the buyer only had 60 percent as much money with which to buy the car! Instead, they'd forged ahead with their own Kadett, Olympia and Admiral models, plus the Blitz lorry, with only the Blitz bearing serious resemblance to the prior Bedford.

Thus Hartnett asked for, and got, permission to build GM-H its own manufacturing plant in Australia – specifically in Melbourne, where GM had already set up shop. Doing nothing by halves, Hartnett chartered a plane to fly over the city and identify a nice empty plot suitable for a brand-new factory. After inspecting fifteen possible sites, his attention focused on a tract of sandy, swampy land on the south bank of the Yarra River called Fishermans Bend⁶, a name coined in 1879 by harbour engineer Sir John Coode, after a solitary fisherman who lived on a bend in the Yarra, near what was is now called Coode Island. 

Naturally, that means it's now a peninsula. The bikini-clad girl in the corner hints this map is post-war. (Source: Reddit)

Although located only two kilometres from the city centre, directly across the Yarra from Coode's main wharf facilities, hitherto the city's industry had all but ignored the area. They used it mainly as a chemical dump, with the Ingles Street area home to tallow-rendering for nearby glue and soap factories, plus a manure depot. The only other development had been the Victoria Golf Course and a privately-owned aerodrome, which also served as a race circuit (another motorsport connection!). The view from the air revealed numerous holes where sand miners had dug to feed the city's concrete industry – holes they were supposed to have filled back in, but hadn't. Nevertheless, it was an attractive site for an industrialist – flat and wide-open, with a high-voltage transmission line nearby and a brand-new wharf that had recently been completed by the Harbour Trust opposite. It was perfect.

Although this photo was taken after completion, it still shows off the "sandy wasteland" aspect of the site nicely. (Source: The Race Torque)

Although the traditional owners were the Boonwurrung nation, by 1936 the the site was considered Crown land, and for some time the government was reluctant to sell it. The sale of fifty acres ("or thereabouts") was finally negotiated for £400,000, nearly $47 million in 2023. GM-H was obliged to spend at least another £200,000 on buildings and infrastructure within two years as well, among a laundry list of other stipulations by the Victorian government (my favourite being that all machinery and materials had to be sourced within Victoria, with the rest of Australia to be sought only if Victoria couldn't meet needs, and the rest of the British Empire following only after that. Nothing American, in other words). As Crown land, the sale required its own Act of Parliament and, since the act was signed on the eve of King Edward VIII's abdication to marry Wallis Simpson, it bore the signatures of both Edward VIII and George VI. Victorian Premier Albert Dunstan turned the first sod of earth on 23 February 1936, on what had been a green of the golf course, and the work began.

Since City Road was in poor condition, crowded and rat-infested, Hartnett knew the site would also have to serve as the company's new head office⁷. The initial design thus incorporated an office building, an assembly plant and a warehouse to service Victorian and Tasmanian operations. The assembly plant itself was a large, utilitarian building of a type common to industry around the world, notable only for its sheer size – with a floor area of 30,600 square metres, or more than 7½ acres, it was the largest single-storey building in Australia. When it was finished, the plant was capable of producing a hundred cars a day, travelling along the line on a chain nearly 140 metres long.

The front that GM-H chose to present to the world, however, was the Administration Block, a rather attractive two-storey office building occupying 251-259 Salmon Street. The Art Deco influence on the facade was restrained, but unmistakeable.

Today the building appears to be the head office of Boral concrete. Fortunately, it's also heritage listed.

Remarkably, the whole thing was completed in just seven months. On 5th November 1936, in the presence of 1,500 guests, Joseph Lyons opened the new factory, saying proudly: "There is nothing that Australians cannot attempt and nothing that they will fail to do once they have made up their minds." On the same day, the first car assembled at Fishermans Bend (an Oldsmobile) was driven off the line by the plant's architect, John Storey, with a beaming Larry Hartnett in the passenger seat.

"In fact, nowhere else in the world will there be any [GM] plant containing all of the modern units and processes which will be operating at Fisherman's Bend," reported The Mercury on 11 January 1936. "A place of particular interest will be the special air-conditioned paint processes department, which has been designed to ensure the best possible working conditions, and the total absence of dust, which is so essential to constant high quality in paint finish." Which might come as news to those who remember the quality of Holden paint at some points in their history, but in 1936 all that was still well in the future.

The total cost of the Fishermans Bend plant was estimated at the time as £433,085 ($50.6 million), which was divided between £278,940 for the buildings themselves and £102,653 for the equipment within them. It was a colossal addition to local industry for a country still staggering out of the Depression, but it was nevertheless built with one eye firmly on the future – Hartnett always intended the plant be able to commence full local production as soon as he could extract permission from the masters in New York. And given the company posted a net profit of £1 million ($117 million) by the end of the financial year, that permission couldn't have been too far off.

Pig-Iron Bob
If it was all coming together a bit too easily, don't worry, it wouldn't last. Australia had emerged from the Depression a year earlier than the U.S., but we also took a bigger hit when the so-called "Roosevelt Recession" arrived in 1937. Living in the shadow of its bigger brother, this downturn is all but forgotten today, but it came when Washington started cutting welfare programmes a bit too early, resulting in a downturn in corporate cash and a brief dip in the Dow.

In Australia, however, the recession had less to do with the U.S. than it did with Japan.

(Source)

The Imperial Japanese Army (notably, not necessarily the Imperial Japanese state) had been fighting in Manchuria since 1931. In July 1937, events kicked into overdrive with a full-on invasion of China proper. Seeking help from the wider world, in August the Chinese deliberately expanded the war to Shanghai, where the carnage would be fully visible thanks to all the Western businesses and journalists based there. The news pouring out of Shanghai shocked the world alright, but it resulted in little real help, and it was nothing compared to what happened in December, when the Emperor's troops reached Nanjing...

Our problem was that this was being done (partly, at least) with Australian steel. In the 1920s we'd started realising Australia possessed iron ore of unusual purity, which BHP immediately started exporting – initially to the Americans, but before long the Empire of the Rising Sun took over as our best customer. A Prime Ministerial note from the day outlined that:

...substantial tonnages of iron ore have been exported for several years from Iron Knob in South Australia to Japan. In 1934/35 out of a total export of iron ore from Australia of 400,000 tons 250,000 went to Japan. In 1935/36 out of 430,000 tons 290,000 went to Japan. In 1936/37 out of 270,000 tons 194,000 went to Japan. Balance largely to America in each of these years.

Local enthusiasm for iron-ore exports chilled, however, as fears grew that Japan was in the early phases of a wider war of conquest. We'd been primed to believe this thanks to the notorious Tanaka Memorandum, a document supposedly outlining Japan's strategy for conquering the Pacific in the not-too-distant future. Today this document is generally regarded as a forgery, as it only appeared in 1934 (after fighting in Manchuria had already begun): It seems no-one has ever sighted the original which, given we have the meeting minutes from the conference where the Nazis decided to have a Final Solution, isn't too much to ask. But a thing doesn't have to be true to be influential, and the outbreak of war in China gave the Memorandum a huge injection of credibility.

On 18 April 1938, therefore, the Lyons government in Canberra passed a total ban on the export of iron ore – a ban that would stay in place until 1960. Their stated reason was that Australia had only so much ore to go around and most of it would be needed for domestic use, which is incredibly funny given the shape of the economy today: In reality, they were probably just squashing a rival for BHP. But there were no restrictions placed on exports of lesser scrap or pig iron, which led to the infamous Dalfram Dispute of 1938.

On 15 November that year, the British cargo steamer SS Dalfram docked at Port Kembla, NSW. The wharfies enquired as to the nature of the cargo and its destination, and when told it was indeed pig iron for Japan, they downed tools and walked away. The wharfies were on strike, and would remain so for the next ten weeks.

Making his way through the protesters. (Source: Robert Menzies Institute)

This was one strike that didn't have the support of the Labor party, however, so they called in then-Attorney General (and future Prime Minister) Robert Menzies to massage the situation. Despite solidarity strikes across the country (and immense support from Australia's Chinese immigrant community, who provided food to striking workers' families so they didn't go hungry), Menzies ultimately broke the strike and the workers loaded the iron "under protest". The whole affair had achieved little beyond giving an unknown number of Chinese people ten more weeks of life, and Menzies suffered the epithet "Pig Iron Bob" for the rest of his life.

And in the end, as feared, we got it all back a few years later when the Kates and Zeroes hit Darwin and Broome, and the mini-subs popped up in Sydney Harbour to torpedo the ferries. The War to End All Wars, Part 2, was only months away.

¹ There's a reason such politics are called "reactionary"...

² 15th Hussars are probably best known for serving at Waterloo, but also for carrying out the Peterloo massacre not long after. In-keeping with fascism being a middle-class phenomenon, however, in civilian life he had the whitest, most salmon-mousse job imaginable: He was an antiques dealer.

³ Although it's generally reported that he cut the ribbon, at least one witness claimed he failed to do so with his sword, and the ribbon only parted when the hooves of his rearing horse broke it. Given the Pattern 1908 cavalry sword was basically a pointed crowbar, designed for skewering not slashing, it's quite likely this is true.

⁴ You know how when a country's name starts with, "People's Democratic Republic of", you know it's going to be none of those things...?

⁵ The car was probably the 1937 Plymouth Deluxe P4 – which, believe it or not, is the car that underpins the hedgehog car in Mad Max: Fury Road.

⁶ Fishermens Bend, Fisherman's Bend... being from the 19th Century, the spelling varied from person to person and somehow, by osmosis, we ended up settling on the most annoying version. The lack of an apostrophe will never not irk me.

⁷ GM Australia might've only moved in a decade earlier, but the building itself dated back to the 1870s.