"A little scrap of metal"
Olive Drab Magazine Vol2 No1 Aug/Sep2002
Official magazine of the Military Vehicle Collectors Society of South Australia and the National Military Vehicle Museum of Australia.
By Julie Baird
Senior Curator
The National Motor Museum – Birdwood
When most people think of the National Motor Museum’s collection, large vehicles spring to mind. The museum has over 400 vehicles on display in Birdwood including the 1898 Shearer and the 1908 Talbot, the first car to cross Australia. What is less well known is the museum’s broad collection of Automobilia.
The term Automobilia covers a wide array of transport related objects from oil bottles and toys to brochures and jewellery – and identification plates.
In 1856, four years after emerging from Staffordshire England, James Alexander Holden began his saddle making and leather working business on King William Street, Adelaide. German immigrant, Henry Frost joined Holden in 1885 and the company expanded during the nineteenth century. By 1914, Holden and Frost were still leather workers but also ironmongers, horse drawn coachbuilders and repairers, motorcycle sidecar body builders and car upholsterers.
Most international car manufacturers developed from blacksmiths, bicycle or armament manufacturers or coachbuilders. Holden and Frost began building car bodies in 1914. In 1917, the wartime Australian Government restricted the importation of complete cars, because they were seen as luxury items. Only one complete car could be imported for every three chassis. Holden and Frost were able to move into the car body market on a large scale. Holden Motor Body Builders was created as a separate division of Holden and Frost in 1918 and produced 587 car bodies in their first year. Local body building on an imported chassis was an international phenomenon and accounts for the variation between cars of the same make, model and year worldwide. Coachbuilders used plates attached to the bodies of cars to identify their work. Customers may buy an American Dodge but the plate signifies a South Australian made Holden Body.
It is at this juncture in time that the object pictured finds its significance. A winged figure representing industry sits towering in the foreground cradling a car in his left arm. He holds a sledgehammer in his right arm, its head resting between his feet at the lower centre of the plate. Six factory buildings belch smoke in the background. Classical columns surround the scene. The base of the scene has bold capital letters HOLDEN BODY. It is a perfect example of image portraying “industry as god and saviour”.
This ornate badging was not suitable for small pressing and was expensive to produce. As car body production numbers increased, the company found the design increasingly unsuitable and in 1926 began searching for a new symbol.
The now familiar lion replaced the winged figure of industry in 1928. It was designed by George Raynor Hoff, a leading sculptor and based on the Egyptian lion used to symbolize Britain’s Wembley exhibition in 1924. The original sculpture remains in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia. Today’s corporate symbolism for the company is based on the Hoff sculpture.
As fashion for historical illusions changed and the need for faster and cheaper production methods triumphed, we are left with a small scrap of metal with an idealistic vision of industrialism as a reminder of the beginning of a South Australian car manufacturing giant.
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