Off To Canada

BUT FIRST there was a short sojourn back in Oz with my dear parents. By this time, the very early 1970s, Dad had progressed to the Volkswagen 1600, which was a radical difference in appearance from the Beetle, really called the Type 1. It was still built on a chassis, with a rear air-cooled engine, but it was a bit bigger & more conventional appearance. Dad's was probably a 1971 or so, & likely fully imported from Germany, although some other body shapes were made in Melbourne, until production ceased, with the remaining cars just being imported as CKD, which means in pieces for reassembly - Complete Knock Down. A new company was formed to do this which also assembled Datsun & Volvos.

The 1600 served them very well, & initially I recalled it as a nice car, but upon a visit when it was some 15 years old, the upholstery had lost its comfortable padding & the car was terribly hot without air-con.
Cars in Australia can last for decades longer than in Canada or northern US states as rust is not a problem in such a dry climate, so on later visits to Melbourne it was interesting to see the same cars still going strong, even if the paint & dashboards faded from prolonged exposure to the hot sun.
Some other family members had memorable cars: a cousin drove - & carefully polished & maintained - a Mayflower, & an uncle owned a lovely Humber Snipe.

But my partner didn't enjoy life in Australia, so after a short return to England, where we lived & worked in Hampshire, we, with a very young son, moved to Toronto, Canada.
With family responsibilities now, a steady job was obtained & we soon bought a house. Houses were quite affordable then, in Toronto, & I observe that our first house, bought for around $50,000, would be worth some 25 times that now, making it, & most other houses in Toronto, too expensive for  young families. And so it was then I was able to afford my first NEW car!
Not that the bright yellow Fiat 128 we carefully chose was a luxurious car, but it was well reviewed, back then when car reviews had meaning & were useful & trustworthy - so very different from the superficial rewrites of company blurbs you read nowadays.

Our little car had front wheel drive, just like my earlier Renault & unlike the rear wheel drive VWs I had become used to, & fwd was a significant advantage in snowy Ontario.
We were fortunate enough to be able to spend weekends & holidays in the country, and even more fortunate in that my job also provided a car for business & personal use. We were supposed to keep track of personal miles & not claim them back in our expense accounts, but this was a minor expense, so instead on taking our new Fiat over rough, unpaved gravel roads, through salty slush & often deep snow, we used the company car, a  1973 Ford Torino, which to me, seemed enormous, as did the following Chevrolet Chevelle. Here's photo of me (and her) from that time. I have mixed feelings about these very large American cars. On the one hand they handled terribly - going over bumps while cornering often made the back end hop sideways, and the seats, although wide, were not really comfortable. But there is something appealing about the effortless power of a big, lazy V8 engine, as well as the burbling sound the engine makes.

And then promotion came along, & the significant pay raise was modified by the loss of the car as the job became mostly an indoors one. I didn't really mind having to go to the office every day as I wasn't disciplined enough to work efficiently from home 3 days a week, & public transport in Toronto was both good & cheap, as it still is.
But the Fiat, being a European economy car from a climate far less harsh than Canada's, really wasn't cut out for deep snow as we suffered from in the snowbelt part of Ontario where we spent weekends. Lovely in the summer, but then, 8 months of the year...Brrr!