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Book Review
| Robert Colon and John Perkins, Wheels and Deals: the Automotive Industry in Twentieth-Century Australia, Aldershot and Burlington VT, Ashgate, 2001. pp. x + 180. £47.50 cloth.
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| Despite its long-held status as one of the most motorised nations on earth, Australia was slow to develop a fully-fledged automotive manufacturing industry. For the first half of the twentieth-century Australia's appetite for cars was satisfied either by fully imported vehicles or by the importation of chassis and engines which were then fitted with Australian built bodies. It was not until 1948 that General Motors produced Australia's first mass-produced, wholly built passenger car, the Holden. As sales boomed and ownership of a car became commonplace, other overseas carmakers scrambled for market share, either establishing local assembly plants or engaging in full-scale manufacture in Australia. At its peak in the 1970s there were no less than six carmakers — GMH, Ford, Chrysler, BMC, Nissan and Toyota — operating full-scale manufacturing plants in Australia. Australia's small population base, and competition from cheap (mostly Japanese) imports, made it difficult for all to survive. Today with motorisation in Australia approaching saturation point (6.3 vehicles for every ten people) only four full-scale manufacturers — GMH, Ford, Mitsubishi (who took over the Chrysler factory in Adelaide) and Toyota — remain. It is only a recent surge in exports that allow two of the carmakers to make a reasonable profit. |
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This book examines the emergence of motor vehicle manufacturing in Australia. Co-authored by two economic historians it is very much a top down view of the industry in Australia. Throughout the focus is on the interaction between economic factors and Federal government policy in explaining why car making in Australia developed in the way it did. There is nothing here about what it may have been like to work for Adelaide's Holden Motor Body Builders, or to have assembled T Models at Geelong, or to have worked on the assembly line at Fisherman's Bend. Labour relations are not part of this story. Nor is the selling, maintaining, or repairing of cars touched on, even though they remain a major part of economic activity (and employment) in the automotive industry. |
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What the authors do reveal however is the way in which Australia's tariffs stimulated growth in the local body building industry (and may have inhibited motorisation in the 1920s). Although the tariff regime allowed for preferential rates for Empire goods, the authors show how US automotive manufacturers were able to use the factories they had established in Canada to evade the higher customs duties. The significant role the Canadian motor industry played in Australian motoring in the interwar years is well emphasised by the authors. They also show why the heavier and lower-powered British sourced vehicles failed to make any headway against the lighter and more powerful US cars in the 1920s and 30s. Less successful is their account of the pre-war Lyons and Menzies government's attempts to promote full-scale automotive manufacturing in Australia. Similarly the whole post-war development of motor vehicle manufacture, from the birth of the Holden through to the present day, is dealt with in a very perfunctory fashion. Five chapters are devoted to pre-World War II developments and only three chapters examine the industry since 1945. The weighting needed to be the other way around. |
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| Australian National University |
J.W. KNOTT | |
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