Abstract
Holden is arguably the most important vehicle brand in Australian transport history. As a result, it is intimately tied to the cultural, social and economic history of the nation. This paper discusses the tension that emerges, and the issues faced when trying to bring Holden, and all it represents, into the museum space and tell its complex story to a diverse and changing public audience. The task has been magnified, facilitated and made more urgent since the closure of the last Australian Holden manufacturing plant in 2017. Now that Holden is more realistically identified with a defined historical period, this article explores how the National Motor Museum of Australia (NMM) represents that history through thoughtful and appropriate museological practice.
Introduction
There is no vehicle more closely associated with the Australian national story than the Holden car. 1 First appearing at the end of 1948, just in time to support the growth and development of burgeoning suburban life, post-war economic recovery and a substantial increase in immigration, the Holden car quickly became one of the most recognisable features of modern Australia as “a cultural product of national significance”. 2 Anne Rees claims “mobility” is a “defining characteristic of the Australian modern”, and that “[t]ransport technologies carried a whiff of the future”. 3 The Holden car made domestic mobility easier, cheaper, more accessible, more locally focused, and linked automotive manufacturing with national growth and future prosperity. 4 At the same time, Holden represented the somewhat contradictory ideals of adventure and security that underpinned the unique experience of the “baby boomers” and their families in the second half of the twentieth century. The connection is so significant, so symbolic, and so inherent to understanding the Australian self that it is not surprising that the National Motor Museum of Australia (NMM) assumed responsibility for telling the story of Holden, especially after production ended in 2017. This is not an easy task, as Holden is so much more than just a vehicle and motor museums traditionally struggle to layer transport stories and move beyond vehicle collection and display. This article examines how the National Motor Museum processed and exercised its responsibility and how, through collection and thoughtful curation, the Holden story could, and could not, be represented. To do this we focus on four key exhibitions: Sunburnt Country: Icons of Australian Motoring, [re]assembled, Holden Heroes: A Retrospective 1948–2017, and Holden and Me: Treasures from a Working Life.
Motor museums and museology
Although the emergence of the motor car as a form of transport is absolutely fundamental to the unique unfolding of the twentieth century, its curation within museums has not necessarily represented that fact to the visiting public in wholly effective or innovative ways. In 2001, Colin Divall and Andrew Scott wrote that transport museums in general, and motor museums in particular, “consist of little more than trophies and icons” whose “object-centred and minimally interested transport exhibitions are heirs to the celebratory and progressive legacies of the nineteenth-century museum”. 5 They claimed that the traditional display in a motor museum stemmed from the “Whiggish” approach to history which “conceptualises technological progress as an asocial, apolitical process, presenting technological knowledge and the technical qualities of artefacts as matters divorced from the rough and tumble, the messy complexity, of everyday existence”. 6 Museum objects, including cars, were grouped, labelled and displayed to reinforce the values of the state while visitors became the passive consumers of pre-packaged knowledge.
The first permanent exhibition of motor vehicles in France and Germany in 1927 and 1936 respectively, reinforced the traditional nineteenth century view of a museum as presenting knowledge in an uncritical, uncontested and uncontroversial way, and that pattern has largely continued. 7 Motor museums remain heavily focused on a strict chronological presentation of vehicles that reveals technological and stylistic innovation. The display of vehicles on mirrored floors and pedestals, in pristine condition, and with labels that note technical specifications encourage the view that cars are to be admired as a form of technological achievement, art or sacralised object. “For the large part”, wrote Rob Pilgrim “motor museums display their vehicles like jewels in a treasure house.” 8 Clay McShane even called visitors to motor museums “pilgrims” and “worshippers”. 9 Bugatti historian Julius Kruta referred to the Museé National de l’Automobile in Mulhouse, France, with its collection of 400 Bugattis, as a “temple to the glory of Bugatti”. 10 Appreciation of vehicles as collectable objects has largely been restricted to the initiated, otherwise known as enthusiasts, who, explained Pilgrim, “have no interest in the curator's aim, the story or narrative which the museum is trying to communicate; they have only come to see the objects of their own personal obsession”. 11 This tension highlights the common origin of motor museums in private collections and reflects the original collector's passion and purpose as the “desire to collect – and implicitly, to classify” rather than to tell a story. 12
At the same time, in response to post-colonialism, feminism and postmodernism, other museums, especially those with ethnographic collections, have become more closely aligned to contemporary political and cultural expectations to develop new approaches that foreground alternative and marginalised voices, and tackle controversial and challenging subjects. 13 As a result, museums have become more curatorially agile, and rely less on traditional displays. Graham Black has even criticised the whole idea of the permanent exhibition with a focus on imparting learning as a nineteenth century model arguably unfit for a twenty-first century audience. 14 Still more recently, scholars have called on museums to go even further and promote social justice and environmental awareness more proactively so that the contemporary museum would become a supportive site of activism. 15 However, the motor museum can often appear outside these broader museological developments. Pilgrim asserts that “[r]arely are contemporary issues addressed in the motor museum. It is not contested terrain”. 16
While traditional museums display objects for the edification of the public, and while motor museums express that intention by exhibiting cars in lines and with limited interpretative context, motor museum curators could be much more receptive to changing museological practice and recognise the potential of their collections to tell different and more diverse motoring stories. Divall, and then more recently Oliver Betts, both advocate a closer relationship between historians and curators in order to “invigorate and challenge the thinking around museum collections”. 17 The research work of academic historians can open up new avenues for exploration and exhibition. For example, Bettina Grundler has drawn attention to the way in which motor museums can have a political purpose by examining National Socialism's connections with the Deutsches Museum. 18 Kurt Möser has argued for greater attention to the more disturbing stories of car culture paying attention both to the links between automobilisation and war, and risk and safety. 19 Jennifer Clark has advocated a broader approach to motoring history within museums in order to capture the complexity of the motoring experience largely through attention to social history including road trauma and road safety. 20 But Joseph J. Corn argues that museums and academic history offer different things: “many of the ideas or topics considered important by academic historians of technology would be very difficult, if not impossible, to make into successful artifact-oriented exhibits”. 21
Motor museums in particular, and transport museums more generally, all struggle to balance the contextual story against the easier and perhaps more popular option of the preservation and display of examples of technological progress. Some transport museums such as The Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, both surrounded their cars with contemporary cultural artifacts to suggest they were part of a bigger picture and not what Steven Lubar called “simply bits of technology and design”. Even so, these museums did not explore difficult or uncomfortable questions. 22 Lubar discussed the same issues when relating his own experience of designing America on the Move. Because this exhibition was built for the National Museum of American History in Washington D.C., Lubar argued that the focus had to be historical stories rather than technological progress: “A car or train museum might define itself around that audience [enthusiasts], but that was not the role of the National Museum of American History. We wanted to reach a broad audience with an important national story.” 23
The debate reflects but does not solve the issue of museum attendances that are not keeping pace with socio-economic increases, rising education levels or even population growth. 24 Bruno S. Frey and Stephan Meier argue that the correlation between museum attendance and education levels “plays a larger role for museums of modern art and history than for museums of science and technology, especially transport museums (railways, cars, or space travel)”. 25 Motor museums draw a different visitor. McShane, for example, knows that working class men tend to visit American motor museums and, based on his observations at the Museo dell’ Automobile in Turin, he assumes the same for Italian visitors. 26 Pilgrim would just call it a “blokemuseum”. 27
Brand museums such as the Mercedes Museum in Stuttgart and the Volvo Museum in Gothenburg actively tell the brand story historically, technologically, and contemporaneously with new developments in manufacturing and design. These museums are showrooms for the brand as much as they are motor museums. The National Motor Museum is not a Holden brand museum. Its purpose is to exhibit a variety of vehicles for visitors to enjoy, but also, and especially more recently, to tell niche motoring stories that illuminate the unique Australian motoring experience. 28 None, regardless of how well told or individually significant, can surpass the story of Holden in terms of national importance. This article will outline the key elements to the national Holden story as a company and an iconic brand of cars. We then discuss how the challenge for the National Motor Museum of Australia is to address not only the broad issues identified by research into motor museums over the last twenty years, including their exhibition style and their attention to the interests of largely male enthusiasts, but to add to it the responsibility of telling a national story of almost mythic proportions.
The Holden story
The Holden brand has deep roots in Australia, stretching back to 1859 when James Alexander Holden established a saddlery business in Adelaide. 29 In 1923, the American company, General Motors (GM), engaged what had become Holden's Motor Body Builders, to build car bodies. Holden opened a new factory for that purpose a year later. Production rose dramatically to 22,150 car bodies per annum in 1924 but when the Depression hit production fell and the company faltered, with just 1651 bodies built in 1931. 30 That year, GM paid over £1 million to acquire the Australian company and the result was the formation of General Motors-Holden, or GMH. While there were further name changes over the years, colloquially, the company became widely known within Australia simply as Holden.
A new factory opened at Fishermans Bend in Melbourne in 1936, but then came war, and the factory was turned over to the production of war ordnance of all kinds, from machine guns to refrigerators. As war drew to a close, the Australian government began to turn their attention to post war building and the idea of a car for Australians looking to a peaceful future. In 1948 the Holden 48-215, otherwise known as the FX, appeared as a brand-new Australian car. The Holden factories steadily increased production: by 1954 they were producing 255 Holdens a day. 31 Success for Holden continued with increased production, improved sales, international exports, and new models. To meet demand a new factory was opened in Elizabeth, a northern suburb of Adelaide, in 1962. Named for the Queen who visited in 1963, Elizabeth was promoted to new migrants as a modern suburb brimming with opportunities for a successful and comfortable life. Thousands of migrants bought a house in Elizabeth and paid for it with a new job at the local Holden plant. Protected by tariffs almost since its inception, the automotive manufacturing industry boomed in the wake of World War II; over half the cars sold in Australia were locally built, and a huge number of Australian families across generations relied on Holden as a source of employment. By 1959, Holden factories were producing almost 500 vehicles a day, exporting to 25 countries, and employing 18,919 workers. 32 The impact of the industry was such that automotive manufacturing, with Holden at its forefront, became a key element in Australia's burgeoning post-war success and identity, and what Georgine Clarsen describes as “the nation's transition from a rural economy based on agricultural production into a projected industrial maturity”. 33
After import restrictions were lifted in the 1960s, Holden, like other automotive manufacturers in the market, was plagued with industrial disputes and financial difficulties. By 1991 Holden was no longer the car of choice for Australian consumers. 34 The Global Financial Crisis of 2008, dealt a final crushing blow. Exports fell and jobs were lost. Just one year later General Motors filed for bankruptcy. 35 Holden was not the only vehicle manufacturer to suffer. Mitsubishi closed its Australian plant in 2008 followed by Ford in 2016. Holden could not hold on alone and production finally ceased altogether in October 2017.
The closure of the Holden plant at Elizabeth ended the history of Holden production in Australia. According to Royce Kurmelovs, it was the “end of an Australian dream”. 36 The story of disconnection continued when in 2020, General Motors announced that the Holden brand would be completely retired, and dealerships would close. All that remained was a nostalgic identification of Holden and Australian life in the halcyon post war days “when the country used to do its own heavy lifting”. 37
Australia's car
Holden was arguably the most important manufacturing industry in Australian history, in economic and cultural terms. The production of Australia's first complete car in 1948 was described by Holden's Managing Director, Lawrence Hartnett, as “the largest single manufacturing venture ever launched in Australia”. 38 It fed the Australian love of the motor vehicle. John Knott explained the rapid growth of domestic motorisation by noting that Australian “geography and history lent the motor car a distinctly Australian cultural significance”. 39 At the same time, the construction of a local automotive manufacturing industry was part of nation-building supported at the government level by favourable tariff and immigration policies. 40 Moreover, it was a way to retain the skilled workforce as part of war readiness for the future. 41 Holden's role in nation-building is so significant that The National Museum of Australia recognised the launch of the Holden FX as one of Australia's nationally “defining moments”. 42 An image of the Holden FX car is featured on the Australian Bicentennial Commemorative Medal minted in 1988. 43 The National Museum holds the first prototype of the Holden 48-215 as well as a 2017 Holden Calais, one of the last cars to be completed before production ceased altogether, in its small, and highly selective, automotive collection. 44
Although “the Australian car” was intended to serve a range of fundamental economic, demographic, and national purposes, the FX, and Holden models that followed including the Kingswood, have gained almost legendary status as Australian cultural symbols. Generations of young Australians grew up with Holden as representative of modern suburban life, perhaps best epitomised in the eponymous 1980s television series, Kingswood Country. When the writers of this comedy program were asked about selling the show internationally, they doubted it was feasible, partly because the depth of the Australian association with the Kingswood car, which led to the main comedic catchphrase of the show, was impossible to translate into other languages and cultures.
45
The fictional Holden-loving main character of Kingswood Country was relatable to an Australian audience, because he was easily recognisable. Kelly Gardiner's real-life memory of her grandfather's Holden, for example, is reminiscent of countless stories of life with Holden: “My grandfather's was the first - and one of the original models”, she wrote: Pop had grown up catching rabbits at Fishermen's Bend, and now not only was he buying an Australian-made car, but one made in the neighbourhood. He drove it around port Melbourne and wept with pride. My mum remembers it as the biggest thing that had ever happened in the whole world.
46
The way the initial circumstances surrounding the development of an Australian car evolved over the years into something legendary was partly due to effective advertising that played on the relationship between Holden, national development, and the popular idea of “Australia's own car”. This connection was made even more obvious in the 1970s when an advertising jingle linked “football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars” giving Holden an instant iconic status. 47 The advertisement was enormously successful and culturally influential, but although it promoted the genuine Australianness of Holden, it was actually a version of the American advertisement for General Motors’ Chevrolet promoting ‘baseball, hot dogs, apple pies and Chevrolet’ and there was a different version again for the South African market. 48 The Holden had clear American roots, and indeed, was always American owned, and so its appeal for the Australian market was consciously created. Ironically, as Kurmelovs noted, “the Holden badge may be draped in the Australian flag, but the company itself is a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors and American to its core”. 49 That didn’t seem to matter.
The significance of Holden to the Australian national identity, to Australian transport history and especially to Australia's emergence from World War II into a new modern era can not be overestimated. The challenge for the National Motor Museum, an institution dedicated to preserving and displaying motoring history, is to offer the fullest representation of the Holden story as told through objects and exhibition design. However, the NMM has its own limitations.
The National Motor Museum
The National Motor Museum of Australia has been known by that name since 1988, having attained the status of the most significant collection of Australian motoring heritage after the South Australian Government purchased in 1977 what was once a private museum opened by two enthusiastic collectors in 1965. Since 1984 it has been managed by the History Trust of South Australia, an agency of the South Australian Government which champions social history and, for the most part, operates museums that fit the modern, audience-centric, and socially conscious model of the twenty-first century museum. The museum website describes its vision with specific reference to social history: As an international centre for the collection, research, preservation, education and display of Australian road transport history, the National Motor Museum is much more than a collection of vehicles. It is a social history of the way we were, the way we are now and the way of the future. It is the ride of our lives!
50
Although Pilgrim claimed the National Motor Museum failed as a social history museum, and certainly, the museum is more about the cars as objects, in recent years a number of exhibitions, both temporary and permanent, have focused a lot more on the social history of motoring, and the motor vehicle as an object of social change and development. 52 By looking specifically at the four main exhibitions that feature Holden, it is possible to see how the NMM has approached the responsibility of telling the Holden story.
Sunburnt country
The first planned permanent exhibition with a focus on Holden's manufacturing history was 2013's Sunburnt Country: Icons of Australian Motoring. The exhibition, which occupies permanently what was once the museum's most prominent temporary exhibition area, includes a select few vehicles to represent milestones in the nation's early automotive history, from its early adoption (through the display of the Shearer steam carriage, built along the Murray River in South Australia around 1897) through to the birth of large-scale manufacturing with the advent of Holden. Though the display space is circular and there is no clear linear path to follow the exhibition through, its natural end is with the display dedicated to the Holden 48-215, showcasing a blue “FX Holden”, one of the first available for sale, which was owned by Prudence Holden, the wife of James Holden, who was head of manufacturing operations at the company's Woodville factory at the time. Surrounded by the celebratory imagery created by the company at the release of “Australia's Own Car”, the car is included among a narrow selection of very significant and “heroic” vehicles, such as the 1908 Talbot which was the first car to cross the country from Adelaide to Darwin, or the Leyland Badger truck used by famed “Outback mailman” Tom Kruse along the Birdsville track in the middle of the twentieth century. The Holden is elevated to an almost legendary status; indeed, original plans were for a second exhibition in the style of Sunburnt Country which would trace the next 50 years of motoring in Australia and Holden's prominent role in this period. These were abandoned, however, as the announcement of the impending closure of all major automotive manufacturing in Australia by the end of 2017 created a sudden urge to focus on the effects this would have on the country's motoring history.
[Re]assembled
The shutdown of local operations of automotive manufacturing giants Ford, Toyota and Holden in quick succession between 2016 and 2017 generated a flurry of interest in preserving and displaying Australia's heritage of automotive manufacturing. After about a century of being one of the biggest employers in Australia and one of the most significant segments of Australian manufacturing (the largest manufacturing workforce in Australia at its peak in the 60 s and 70 s, and second only to structural metal production in its later years the closure of major manufacturing operations in the country was seen as a major milestone. 53
The first long-term major exhibition planned at the National Motor Museum following the shutdown of automotive manufacturing in Australia, [re]assembled, sought to summarise the impact of the industry by presenting six vehicles built between 1907 (a Daimler Landaulet bodied by prominent South Australian coachbuilder Vivian Lewis) and 1983 (the prototype first series Mitsubishi Magna) underneath a visually impactful reminder of the last days of large scale manufacturing: six “C carriers” from the assembly line salvaged from Holden's Elizabeth factory, each holding a vehicle representing a stage in the assembly process, from unpainted shell to completed vehicle. In reality, the process of assembling a complete vehicle at Holden's factory had not followed this simple linear progression for decades; rather, the various stages occurred in different plants and at different times, coordinated by electronic systems of ever-increasing complexity. The overhead display of the “C carriers” in the [re]assembled exhibition serves as what Mortensen calls immersive experiential exhibits - ones that “rely on an indicative or symbolic relationship with their reference worlds”. 54 Its primary intended function was not to interpret exactly how a vehicle might have been manufactured at the Elizabeth factory in 2017, but rather to convey some of the scale, complexity and sophistication attained by the automotive manufacturing industry in Australia. As Tiina Roppola points out, this immersive approach “broaden(s) … the ontological and epistemological effect of the (exhibit).” 55
Certainly, the intended impact of the overhead “C carrier” display has been achieved: few are the museum visitors who do not immediately look up in wonder at the massive display when first entering the museum. The result has not been entirely as planned, however, and despite efforts to ensure that a broad cross-section of makes and models are displayed in the exhibition (including two Holdens, two Fords, a Mitsubishi and the earlier Daimler as the vehicles representing the products of the industry), the prominence of the assembly line hovering above the entire display leads many visitors to refer simply to it as “the Holden assembly line exhibition”. More than 50 per cent do not make the connection between the portion of the exhibition which is overhead and the six vehicles at ground level, as the building's awkward architecture and lack of a defined exhibition space anywhere in the large Pavilion of Australian Motoring made it difficult to tie the two levels together visually. 56
For those museum visitors wanting to “deep dive” into the history of automotive manufacturing in Australia, a touch screen provides a wealth of historical information about the industry and some short documentaries about smaller automotive companies affected by the closure. Though extensive and informative, this content fails to discuss many of the economic, social, and political realities that surrounded the automotive industry – particularly in its final days. This was not a decision taken uncritically by the exhibition's curators, but rather born of the need to maintain positive ties with Holden (whose financial and technical support was essential to create the overhead “C carrier” display) and the fact that the curators are bound by the South Australian Public Sector Code of Ethics, which prevents them from engaging in political commentary as part of their role. 57 The result of these constraints was an exhibition which has an overall take on the industry – and on Holden – as celebratory. This is even more true of the second exhibition that was planned in partnership with the outgoing automotive giant, one that unashamedly focused on Holden alone.
Holden heroes: A retrospective 1948–2017
Arriving late in 2020 at the NMM, the exhibition Holden Heroes: A Retrospective 1948–2017 features the “A list” of Holden's heritage collection on long-term loan from General Motors Australia & New Zealand (GMANZ). It includes the first and last Holdens off the line, several well-known prototype and concept vehicles and a collection of “milestone vehicles” (millionth build numbers, from the 1 millionth Holden – an EH Sedan – to the 7 millionth, a VE Commodore). Given their deep significance to Australia's industrial heritage, these vehicles have been the subject of intense discussions between the Australian government, General Motors, and cultural leaders around Australia about their long-term custodianship. As the exhibition title suggests, they are exhibited as heroic and glamorous pieces, elevated (quite literally, on new checker plate flooring) above the rest of the museum's displays. This approach of highlighting these vehicles as Australian cultural treasures was driven in large part by their status and notoriety – particularly in the motoring community – and by contemporary public discourse about the collection, with (unfounded) rumours growing that GM had a plan to transfer this collection to their heritage centre in the United States and deprive Australians of the possibility to freely access these significant objects. Admittedly, the display does little to depart from the celebratory display of ‘trophies and icons’ decried by Divall and Scott. 58 The decision was not taken uncritically, however, but was informed primarily by the necessity to fulfil the desires of the lender. With motor museums around Australia vying for the opportunity to display the most prized pieces of GMANZ's Holden heritage collection, the museum opted to propose a display that celebrated the company's most famous models and evoked the nostalgia of Holden lovers expected to flock from all over the country to “pay their respects” to the outgoing marque. To adopt a more critical approach to the display, perhaps addressing the complex web of industrial, economic, social and government policy factors that contributed to the demise of the Holden brand may well have cost the National Motor Museum the opportunity to display the vehicles in the first place.
Many of the museum's visitors gravitate towards the “milestone” vehicles, seeking out the more ordinary production models amongst the extraordinary prototypes that were never released for public sale. The personal connection to vehicles such as the HR Holden or the VC Commodore, which they or a family member may have owned in their youth, often trumps the allure of the exotic concept vehicles they have likely only heard of or seen in a magazine. This personal connection in many cases runs deeper: Holden was a significant employer in South Australia, and in fact the National Motor Museum is located in the Northern Adelaide Hills, just “up the hill” from the suburb of Elizabeth and a community that has relied on the Holden factory for generations.
Shortly after the opening of [re]assembled it became clear that an additional exhibition was necessary to discuss an aspect of the automotive industry which had not been given enough prominence in the display. The fully assembled car on the final “C carrier” represented the first hint at the representation of the workforce in the industry, having been signed by hundreds of Elizabeth factory workers in the final year of operations. At the exhibition's midway point is a “breakout room”, representing a typical space in which workers would stop for breaks. Large-scale images of manufacturing staff at work across the decades line the entire exhibition. On the whole, however, it is the vehicles rather than the workers that are most prominent in the exhibition.
Holden and me
In 2021 the National Motor Museum partnered with a group of academic historians to produce a small, temporary exhibition which focussed not on the cars that Holden produced, but on objects that represented the working lives of those who built them. The exhibition – Holden and Me: Treasures from a Working Life – was an offshoot of a larger, ongoing, oral history project being conducted by researchers from the University of Adelaide and Monash University to record the life stories, memories and experiences of 100 men and women who worked at Holden between the end of World War II and the closure of the Elizabeth plant in 2017. 59 While not focussed on material culture, during the course of these interviews, participants often showed the interviewer objects that represented aspects of their working lives, and which were clearly still important to them. They included gifts from Holden to mark working and company milestones (gold watches and commemorative badges); items which were part of everyday experiences (tools and work clothes); and objects that symbolised special roles, familial ties, and memorable activities (from sporting trophies to wallets presented to graduating apprentices). Interestingly, while some workers were also keen to show off the Holden cars they owned, especially the employee editions offered in the final years of the company, others declared little interest in the product itself. While all were proud of the vehicles they helped build, and of being part of an iconic Australian company, their best memories of their working lives almost always centred on their co-workers and the sense of “family” within the workplace. “It wasn’t the cars, it was the people,” was a common refrain in the interviews, a theme overlooked in most car-centric exhibitions. 60
Opening in May 2021, the Holden and Me exhibition sought to address this missing element, bringing together a selection of these smaller “treasures” owned by 12 former Holden employees. Together, the working lives of these nine men and three women spanned more than 70 years of Holden in South Australia, from 1945 to 2017, and represented some of the hundreds of different jobs required to make a car: tradesmen, engineers, production workers, forklift drivers, sewing machinists and secretarial staff. Some had started as apprentices and risen through the ranks to become senior managers; others had stayed in the same jobs or left after shorter periods (voluntarily or otherwise) to pursue new opportunities. Some were part of Holden “dynasties”, families with multi-generational links to the company. Others were migrants, joining the multicultural melting pot that was Holden's workforce. All the objects represented a point of significance for their owner, a rite of passage, reward or recognition, or an expression of identity as a Holden worker.
Located in the Museum's Pavilion of Australian Motoring, the Holden and Me exhibition sat alongside the Holden Heroes’ vehicles, featuring a series of display cases designed to look like work benches. Information panels on the wall above provided short biographies and contemporary photographs of the participants while an interactive display allowed visitors to listen to excerpts from the interviews in which workers explained in their own words how the objects illustrated an aspect of their working life. Together, the objects and oral histories combined to tell a different, more intimate aspect of the Holden story, offering an important insight into workers’ own conception of their past, and that of the company.
The exhibition highlighted familial links and migrant histories. Paul Lucantoni's father joined Holden after migrating from Italy after the war, the job providing financial security for his family; Paul and his brothers also worked there, proudly wearing the uniform that identified them as Holden workers. Joan and David Matthews’ wedding photograph linked two Holden families. Joan started in the typing pool when she was 15; her father and uncle were senior managers. There she met David, who worked in electrical maintenance. His father had joined the company's predecessor, Holden & Frost, as a 12-year-old leather maker. Alf Matthew's tools and sewing kit were passed down to his son, who, before lending them to the exhibition, still used them to fix things at home. Joan and David have little interest in cars, nor do they drive Holdens, but, according to Joan, “Holden was, and is part of our family's history”. 61
Subcultures and secrets within Holden's factories were revealed: Clara Boden, whose gold watch earned for 25-years-service was on display, spoke of the women who worked in the trim shop when the rest of the factory's workforce was overwhelmingly male. The unofficial job or “foreignee” that became part of the Holden worker's lexicon, was also represented by a meat cleaver owned by former apprentice Daryl Nettleton, who described how managers turned a blind eye or in some cases oversaw the side production of “home jobs” in the factory. Nettleton, who adopted a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ attitude to “foreignees”, had no doubt that the cleaver would raise a wry smile among visiting Holden workers of a particular vintage.
One of the objects that resonated most powerfully with this visitor demographic was the Holden toolbox. Crafted by patternmakers for each intake of apprentices, many, like Bob Smith's, are still in use in backyard sheds and garages throughout South Australia. Smith, who left Holden soon after graduating to go farming, always treasured his and what it represented: “A Holden apprenticeship was the foundation of my working life”, he said. 62
A job at Holden was not all work; some of the happiest memories of interviewees focussed on the social club and games played during lunch breaks. For former forklift driver Keith Hamilton, a silver shield presented to winners of his plant's lunchtime indoor bowls competition, brings back a wave of memories of workmates, good times and his father, who started up the social club. Both father and son have their names inscribed on the shield. A misshapen piece of metal fashioned into a trophy, meanwhile, was crafted and gifted to George Vassallo by his workmates in recognition of his skills and tenacity in solving a tricky technical problem that was threatening a lucrative export deal with the United States.
But perhaps the most emotive object on display is Andrew Reade's final day speech notes. A former hospitality worker, Reade had been recruited as a production line worker in 2003 when Holden was booming – and was among the few hundred still there at the end. Asked to speak on behalf of his fellow workers at the final media conference, he initially struggled to find the right words. But his handwritten pages, accompanied by Reade's emotional re-enactment of his speech encapsulated the pride and personal connection that workers past and present felt for their former workplace, and those who worked alongside them. It also captured the pride the workers felt in being part of an iconic brand that they saw as being “proudly Australian”. Since leaving Holden, Reade has retrained as a nurse. “Holden gave me everything,” he said. “It gave me the opportunity to own my own home, it gave me the opportunity to be comfortable … I was very grateful and I feel very privileged”. 63 It was a sentiment echoed by other former workers. Holden was more than the cars it made; for generations of workers, it represented a secure job, good wages, and financial security for their families.
Visions of Holden's past have been heavily shaped by historical research that concentrates on the cars the company built. By contrast, the Holden and Me exhibition celebrated the individual Holden worker, tapping into personal stories to reveal how Holden was entwined in family histories and the identity of those who worked for it. In its small scale and focus on the sometimes simple, little things, it helped reset the understanding of Holden as an employer rather than a manufacturer and served as a reminder of how work can shape our identity, often for the duration of our lives. Planned to run for six months, the exhibition has already been extended twice. Some of the items have been donated and will eventually form part of the museum's permanent collection. The Holden and Me exhibition, while modest, illustrates how car museums can situate histories of vehicles within a larger social history framework, allowing the human experience of those who worked in the automotive manufacturing industry to be experienced and shared by others. By telling a more complex – human – story, there is also the opportunity to reach a wider audience beyond the fans of the product. After all, without the commitment and craftsmanship of the workers, the cars would never have been made.
Discussion
The National Motor Museum of Australia is in a difficult position. Not unlike other motor museums around the world, it is burdened by the historical development of transport museums as collection houses for a considerable number of very large objects that are difficult to display in an innovative or regularly revitalised way, and therefore hard to shuffle through temporary exhibitions, and expensive to store and maintain if they are not on public display. At the same time, the motor vehicle is so central to twentieth century life that the stories cars can tell are almost limitless. Complicating the situation even more, are the political and ethical obligations of government supported institutions, the need to remain financially viable and the recognition that, regardless of what well-meaning historians might like to see happen in the museum, the most frequent and regular visitor is the male enthusiast, and no motor museum can ever afford to lose that visitor in the valiant pursuit of others.
Regardless of these general sectorial and environmental difficulties, the case of Holden in Australia is unique. The NMM has recognised the need to tell the broad story as much as possible using the cars as the mainstay of their collection while managing the generic problems of motor museums around space, politics, audience engagement and partner collaboration. The number of cars and their size means that tying elements of the history together are difficult. Being able to tell the big picture story of national motoring as well as the key features of what is essentially brand history can be counter intuitive. Getting the balance right between having interesting cars on display for enthusiasts and telling a social and industrial history in a way that satisfies other visitors and historians is a challenge. All motor museums struggle with these sorts of conflagrations of a big story, especially a national story. Perhaps a brand museum could have done more, but now that Holden no longer exists in Australia, the NMM must serve the purpose of telling the story of the Holden brand in as many nuanced ways as possible. This has now become a national obligation.
What the four exhibitions - Sunburnt Country, (re)assembled, Holden Heroes and Holden & Me – show us is that the museum can be agile, open, and ready to capitalise on opportunities, willing to collaborate meaningfully with a range of partners, and simultaneously aware of visitor expectations. The NMM manages to negotiate this complex terrain deftly. As a result, we have a record of Holden's contribution to Australian automotive, industrial, and working life. Moreover, what we see in these four exhibitions is a mix of permanent and temporary displays. Perhaps this goes some way to addressing Black's concerns about the stagnation and outdatedness of the permanent exhibition in the twenty-first century. The NMM has been a ready and genuine partner with historians to access new material, new stories and new approaches to motoring history. This productive collaboration means there is always the opportunity to reposition Holden within a new understanding or new interpretation. With that connection the NMM can be an active and ongoing partner in the history-telling process beyond the passive display of vehicles that drew criticism over twenty years ago. This connection is important, because historians constantly press the discipline boundaries looking for different questions to ask and unique stories to tell. The NMM already has a history of such engagement with historians and communities in its innovative exhibitions Bush Mechanics, and Alice Anderson's Motor Service. 64 It is not a change of direction for them to partner with historians to pursue new stories about Holden and its manufacturing history. Rather, it reinforces their collaborative and engaged approach to history as indicated in their mission statement. The challenge will come if at some point in the future, historians propose to tell a controversial story or one that presses against the hard edge of the NMM's boundaries.
Now that the NMM has developed a large Holden footprint, and will inevitably maintain responsibility for the national story, the future for remembering Holden looks bright. However, challenges remain. Ideally, the NMM needs to find ways in which the cars themselves could be unpacked even further to open up new histories of technology, safety, driving experience, manufacturing processes and worker engagement and the cultural representation of Holden in Australia. If motor museums in general, and the NMM in particular, are to continue down the path of innovative and responsive interpretations and representations of important historical events and developments, then the exercise of curatorial courage will be essential.
The finished product sits on the museum floor, the incomplete product hangs in the “C carrier”, and the life of the worker is revealed, but the technological, economic and political decisions that were taken in the process of designing and using Holden cars in the unique Australian physical, cultural and economic environment are yet to be fully explored. In particular, the NMM has not been able to explore the role of government in both the rise and demise of the automotive industry in Australia, especially the role of tariff policy in firstly supporting, and then removing support for the automotive industry. An economic history of fluctuating exchange rates complicated by significant policy settings and changes in political leadership is difficult to set within a structure that relies on objects to tell a story and to attract visitors. Moreover, although culturally, Holden is Australian, fundamentally the parent company was General Motors with headquarters in the USA. Decisions taken overseas, both in the USA and in competing companies in China and Japan also sealed the fate of Holden. These controversial political and economic stories are outside of the scope of the NMM. Difficult and uncomfortable questions also remain unasked about attitudes towards female workers, migrants, worker safety, industrial relations and environmental concerns.
Conclusion
We may well recognise the value of Divall and Scott's 2001 evaluation and criticism of motor museums, at the same time, when we look at actual examples of museum work in action, we see that the reality is a mixture of success and failure in creating a museum that addresses their concerns. By looking at the experience of the NMM in telling the story of Holden as a case study, it is clear that the world of the motor museum is a complex one. The NMM has had to juggle the needs of a variety of visitors, the requirements of Holden as the corporate sponsor, the restrictions of the History Trust of South Australia as the overarching administrative body, and the very real problems posed by physical space and limited finances. Finding new and innovative ways to tell Holden's complex story to a diverse and changing audience will remain a challenge for future NMM curatorial staff. Without a designated brand museum, Holden will only ever be part of the story that the NMM can and should tell, albeit a very significant part. The important thing is that the story is told at all, that the Holden cars are collected, conserved, and displayed, and that the institutional structures encourage and support a contemporary approach to history telling. One way to do this, which may very well offer a way forward to other motor museums as well, is to partner with historians who are both prepared to explore different motoring stories while remaining sensitive to the genuine limitations of motor museums. The Holden & Me exhibition has shown the value of such a collaboration in exposing even traditional visitors to new car-related stories and to the humanising possibilities within heavily technology-focused museums. There is much more to say about Holden, and perhaps it is only through the effective collaboration between historian and curator, and the innovative pairing of objects and stories, that the complexity of Holden's history will slowly be revealed.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and publication of this article: This work was supported by the Australian Research Council, LP170100860.
