Stroppy
I think we feel very much the same way about the future for Holden.
I've lived through every model made and in the 60's and 70's when Holdens were so popular, it was inconcievable that it could ever come to this.
I'm reasonably sure that with the passing of local production, my interest in cars will pretty well cease. It's already waning.
We must be of a similar vintage. I was a kid during GMH's glory days. It was said you could even buy bits for Holdens in supermarket...well that was stretching it, however you probably could buy a RYCO Z30 (Holden 6 type) on some supermarket shelves for sure!
Those were the days when we poured over the magazine spy shots of the "New Holden" taken by intrepid souls who had sneaked into Lang Lang and battled mud and Eastern Brown snakes to take photos. Nearly every second or third car on the road was either a Holden, Falcon or Valiant.
I can remember many happy outings in our "Swan lake blue with two tone white roof" EJ wagon and then, some years later, dad buying his HT Holden Premier (light metallic green with a beige vinyl roof) and optioning it with those faux alloy-wheel lookalike hubcaps. What daring! And that car cut quite an image on the streets of our eastern Melbourne suburb. Then, in 1972 he took me to Blanchards Holden to look at the new HQ. Oh my! I fell in love with the Statesman and the Monaro LS...the LS especially. To me it spoke of luxury and sportiness in one package. Those lines! That chrome valance! And, of course, dad nicked two brochures...one for me and one for him. The options you could choose! They'd do my head in dreaming about my ultimate build. Dad bought himself an HQ Premier (the Statesman was a bit of reach for him) and we said goodbye to the HT Prem which had done 35,000 miles. They gave him $2,500 for it as a trade in (from memory)...I forget what the HQ cost him.
I'll stop rambling here! I think what I am getting at was that Holden was part of Australian culture by the end of the 50s and it was as much of our nation as the Chevy is to the Americans. Of course it wasn't truly Australian (owned by Americans) but we didn't care much back then. How times have changed!