John Lloyd posted this snapshot of a street corner in Melbourne taken in the 1970s. Hello alternate universe. And a rather wild one at that.
Here’s some more ’70s craziness from his photostream:
How’s this for starters? Eight lights and a giant bull bar on an XA Falcon.
Here’s a slightly newer version of the most legendary car to wear the Falcon name.
The equally legendary Holden Monaro GTS.
And a later version of that too.
A Chrysler Charger charging ahead.
And the one that pretty much started it, the earlier generation Falcon. It only came in four doors, so like so many hot Australian cars, but that was not a demerit.
I don’t know the car with the flame effect in the first shot, but I can see where the Rover P8 was going now…..
Its an XA Falcon
The first pic remembers me the ac/dc video to “It’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock n roll”. One of my favourites
That first one has been doing the rounds on facebook for several years at least, usually with a caption pointing out that all the cars in the picture were Australian-made. And usually in the comments someone laments the flared arches on the LC Torana GTR, and what that would be worth today if unmolested.
Autobahnraser, the video was filmed in Melbourne at almost exactly the time that first picture was taken, and today, there’s a laneway in central Melbourne called AC/DC Lane.
Which is a bit odd, as the band was from 1000k away in Sydney!
Nah they were Scottish.
Always found that was one of the best ways to wind up an Aussie when I lived in Perth and they really were seen as demi gods.
Thing I always liked about the first Mad Max was how much period hot rod car culture was in the vehicle designs, wide wheels, fender flares, spoilers, scoops, bullbars, flames, it’s all there in pretty much every car featured in the first movie, not just the famous black V8 Interceptor either, but the yellow Interceptor sedans, the pursuit special Monaro, the 59 Chevy from the biker scene, even Max’s family van and trucks have all levels of cool customization. It always seemed a reflection of a breakdown of society where the hoons exclusively ruled the roadways, good guys and bad guys alike, that first picture with the XA GT with a flame paintjob and the Torana GTR with in-progress fender flares crossing the same intersection could be used in a pictorial prologue before the “… a few years from now” in the opening scene. I think I even read somewhere way back when I
The more well know sequels portraying a baron desert wasteland landscape was never as interesting to me because it just devolved into “what weird objects can we weld to cars to run into other cars”. The tanker truck and the returning interceptor were the only vehicles I liked in the Road Warrior, same with Fury Road, and I hated Thunderdome because it ceased to be an apocalypse featuring cool cars at all.
Sequels often fail to live up to the sheer imagination and creativity of the original.
Don’t get me wrong, I would never say they fail to live up in terms of imagination or creativity(Thunderdome is the only bad sequel IMO), the Road Warrior essentially invented the baron desert aesthetic and pro wrestler like characters in the post-apocalyptic movie genre, it is arguably the most timeless of the series. The first was more like something like The Warriors or Escape from New York with its not to distant future dystopian urban setting, and for me personally I wish that world would have been further explored future movies rather than the “wasteland”.
Well now, as it happens, Mr Matt, hoons exclusively ruling the roads, good and bad guys alike, wasn’t necessarily a thousand miles from the truth in ’70’s Oz when these pictures were taken (and Mad Max was made, just out of Melbourne). This was a male-dominated society, sexist, inward-looking, boozy, anti-intellectual and very racist. Drink-driving, speeding, aggression pretty normal. Car culture was similarly basic, and, as the initial pic shows, variety was not the spice of life – in fact, huge tariffs and quotas on imports made it impossible.
So yeah, “..a few years from now”, during peak Cold War times when dystopia always hovered, that wasn’t too much of a stretch for Dr George Miller in Melbourne.
I was about seven in ’75, and was already a freakishly early CC member, disliking the many hooned-up cars that were no longer original, and rather bored with the uniformity beyond that. All the cars in the pics now sell for large money, due to nostalgia. By and large, I don’t share it.
For me, the best car here is the glimpse of Renault 16, being appropriately whipped into roly-poly round a corner.
Not sure about the Renault justy, but that HT Monaro looks bloody gorgeous
Oh, well, yes, LOOKS is another matter entirely – the Renault looks like a collapsed portaloo. The HK-G Monaros, on the other hand, is simply one of GM’s finest, period, and if not, OF the period. And they weren’t tediously common, either.
I was driving examples of all those Aussie cars right thru the 80s and 90s, some were good some were great some were junk I shouldnt have paid money for,
Damn right
It’s funny to look and think I’ve literally driven every model of car in these pictures, and mostly, they really weren’t up to much. In fact, by and large, they were wheezy, ill-handling crap. But these were all the (top-selling) basic ones, and not young any more: only once did I drive a fully-optioned V8, an HZ, and, with good seats and power steering and quite good handling, it was a properly nice thing. (And an ’80’s WB Statesman, which was even better).
Actually, I did once drive an XB GT, and boy, was it speedy. But it had manual sports-ratio steering, and as a callow youth, I literally could not park it, nor push in the monster clutch for long. How the racers of the ’70’s drove these basic-handling, scary beasts at huge speed for hours on end is beyond me. I couldn’t call it great either, though it would also be unfair to call it crap.
It’s funny for me to think the only one I’ve driven is the XW sedan (or is it an XY) parked in the background of the first shot. Went for my licence in one, haven’t driven one since. Been passenger in many of the others, including being one of five(!) in the back seat of an LC Torana one Saturday night. Three abreast in one of those was bad enough, but the two girls on our laps were a tight fit. Nobody minded – until we got home…….
The black sill treatment on the XB hardtop appeared on many many Falcons not really as a GT lookalike but you could bog up most of the rapidly appearing rust and not have to repaint the whole car to make it tidy again, very average anti rust protection was the norm for Australian cars right up untill they shut the doors recently.
And that’s the sort of thing that led many people to ask themselves “Why should I put up with poor quality?” Next stop, Toyota showroom. Or Nissan, or Mitsubishi, or Mazda, or Subaru, or Honda…. Once buyers realised they didn’t really need a Big Three six-cylinder car, there were plenty of better-built choices. It was just a matter of finding one you could live with.
After the Cortina experience, I had a Mazda-designed but Ford-built Laser. Great car, but I was forever chasing water leaks. Since then, a Suzuki, a Mazda, three Mitsubishis, two Hondas and a MINI have been in our fleet. No problems. (Also a must-have-been-atypical Toyota that put us off the brand for life)
In ;86 a 71 South Melbourne built Toyota Corona 1600 was my first Japanese car not much of a car but it did keep going fairly reliably, mine was rust free the same car in my native NZ disolved within 5 years as did everything else, first of many Japanese cars the majority have been Toyotas.
My 1977 ZH Fairlane Marquis had black sills and lower front guards black from original and yes it made patching work simple as long as the rust stayed down in that area, which it of course wouldn’t.
In later years they did improve rust protection significantly, my 2003 Falcon ute didn’t have a speck of rust anywhere on it, they had to, that ute and van in the top picture would have dissolved years ago.
Running On Empty 1982
Exotic as it may be for non-Australians, that excellent first picture is dreary to me.
Melbourne downtown had been a bit abandoned in the ’70’s, with everyone flocking to the burbs and a swag of ’60’s teardowns of Victoriana and rebuilds so awful that they in turn were sometimes pulled down themselves by only the ’90’s.
It’s grey and drizzling and about, aw, 50-55 degreesF, as dear old Melbourne can be for sometimes 6 months of the year. There’s a gale blowing in from the bay up everyone’s clacker, reducing that 55 to feel like 30. There’s useless pollution gear on carburettors and leaded fuel (for another decade, too), so that intersection just stinks. And the cars are all pretty much just a few models, remodelled. Few are the cool V8’s, few have aircon for summer, fewer still P/S, and just about all have bloody horrid vinyl seats. Also, btw, the cute wooden trams often have no doors, which is always fun in a gale at 50F.
Like anyone, I hanker for certain things of the past, and I’m always saddened the local car industry has entirely, foolishly, gone.
But moments like this, bringing back quite visceral triggers, are good reminders that for every good thing we recall about how things used to be, there were at least four things we forgot that sure weren’t.
I would have been studying up the road at RMIT, halfway through an Applied Biology degree when that first shot was taken. Suburban shopping centres were starting to put the boot into the CBD, but there were still plenty of interesting little back-street or below-street-level shops still in business and architectural gems from a bygone age were still common. Middle-aged people seemed quick to adapt to the new order of the suburbs, but many of the elderly folk I knew still went ‘into town’ once a month of so either for shopping or just to meet up with friends (fancy doing that!), and the Myer delivery van (a Bedford J) would bring home Mrs. Aubrey-next-door’s purchases, often before she arrived home in the taxi (black Belmont). I guess it was all a hangover from the days when Melbourne used to be so much smaller, and all the decent shopping was to be found in the city centre. You find a good shop and keep going there, until one day it isn’t there any more…
Last time I went to Melbourne, about ten years ago, the city centre seemed a wasteland. The kind of place you’d avoid unless you absolutely, positively had to be there. Not inviting at all.
Oh, and all the cool cars in the photos? I’ll cast another vote for that Renault 16, but only if all the electrics are working. The one I test-drove rode beautifully but only half the gauges were functional…..
That Falcon in the third pic looks real nice, I bet it would have done well in the US
I’m with Justy on the R16. Always wished I had even seen one of them on an American street, much less had the chance for a ride or a drive.
Speaking of heavy clutches, I loved the remark from the young man who was given (was willing to take) the job of piloting the Aerolithe Bugatti recreation from the shop where it was built, into the single-car carrier. He said the clutch was “stupid heavy.”
Guess that’s like our New England “wicked heavy,” but with a certain critical slant ?
Fascinating .
In the 1960’s New England it was “pissa wicked” .
-Nate