Other Interesting Cars From My Aussie Days

WHEN I was a teenager our family lived mostly in Australia, which meant that by the 1960s there was a good mix of British & American cars to choose from.Of course, the most popular models were Holden & Falcon, home grown for the most part, taking styling ideas from their parent company in Detroit. An early Holden is a visible prop in the TV series A Place To Call Home,  which is set just outside Sydney in the Fifties. As you can see, it looked very much like big brother Chevrolets.

Falcons had a more modern appearance by the time they came onto the market about 10 years after the Holden, and progressed from the ponton look of Holden into a more integrated shape, thereby doing away with the engine bulge, fender shapes & curved trunk into a 3 box design that would last for many decades until the rise of the CUV of today.
The evolution of car shapes is a very interesting one, beginning as they did from a horseless carriage with a motor, to the powerful, safe & quite efficient car of today.
The trunk was literally that in early days - a luggage receptacle strapped to the back of the car in the US, but the British term "boot" predates "trunk", going back to the 18th century where footmen of wealthy households did double duty as coachmen, and, due to the undeveloped nature of roads those days, need boots for the coach. These were stored in the "boot locker" attached to rear of the coach. Gradually, the "locker" bit was dropped to become just "boot" as is used today.
To my mind there is something very attractive about the shape of cars before, say 1955, when cars in North America underwent a dramatic change in appearance - they were usually very outdated underneath, with cart springs, pre-war engines & poor brakes. And perhaps they needed refined chassis far less that European cars, because that was the time when the wonderfully useful Interstate system of wide, divided, gently curving freeways was put in place. So a big, clumsy car with a floaty ride was popular...for a while until Ralph Nader exposed GM shortcuts in his famous book Unsafe At Any Speed  which was an attack upon Chevrolet's attempt at a smaller car - the somewhat Volkswagen mimicking (by having a rear air-cooled engine) Corvair.