'Why boys of my youth promised so much - but delivered so little.'

I am a child of the 1960s. I don’t mean by this that I was a Flower Child, dropping acid on the lawns at Berkeley and visible on the cover of the Woodstock album in a paisley pantsuit. I mean I was an actual child, drinking warm milk and playing elastics in windswept asphalt schoolyards in Victoria, Australia, sitting on my father’s lap as he drove the EH Holden and flattering myself that it was me steering the vehicle, rather than his discreet knee, while he commented admiringly, ‘Steady as a rock!’

Having your seven-year-old on your lap as you drive no doubt attracts a mandatory jail sentence now, but I’m looking back at the 1960s steeped in my own sort of suburban nostalgia, a magic twilit era redolent with the sensory details that make wallowing in nostalgia worthwhile: the smell of hot vinyl, the chlorine burn of tepid backyard pools, the size of the bubbles you could blow with a five-cent length of Big Charlie bubblegum, your mother’s muttering as she tried to snip the stuff out of your hair with the kitchen scissors. Getting a lucky in your Sunnyboy.

Four cents for a Barney Banana. Oh, I could go on all night, gradually wearing down my audience until only that tiny select group who reached puberty in 1975 would still be with me, gamely Googling the track list for Explosive Hits LPs and checking out Young Talent Time memorabilia on eBay at 3 a.m.

There were serious choices to be made by young men coming of age in the late 1970s in Australia, and the biggest decision of all was not: medicine or law? Or study or work? Or travel or settle down? The only choice that mattered was: HJ or HX?

The 1976 HJ Sandman panel van and the HX Sandman panel van, which came out later that year, were both surf-culture gold. The pros and cons surrounding which model to buy, if you had the choice, elicited in Australian guys a verbal fluency never witnessed in any other context, ever.

Boys you knew to be as monosyllabic and surly as Chewbacca when it came to addressing you normally, whose idea of a conversation was to contribute a rare ‘yeah’ or ‘nup’ when quizzed by a parent, teacher or girl, would only need to start describing Sandman specs to a fellow fanatic for a sudden spurt of eloquence to take over. Australian males of the era were trained from birth to keep any display of enthusiasm strictly under wraps at all times, so this chatty eagernessto communicate was a revelation. It was like hitting a geyser: obviously the HX was an update on the HJ and possessed the grunt of the 5.0 V8 and the limited slip diff, but let’s not forget that the HJ had the radial-tuned suspension package and was the last model fitted with the 350 Chevy donk, before the ADR anti-pollution laws changed the engine specs and you could always drop in a beefedup banjo diff, right?

Or something like that.

We’d stare at them blankly, humbly, waiting for the moment they drew breath. We finally understood the term ‘motormouth’. To us girls, this arcane code meant nothing, and nor was it meant to. It poured over our heads like the Latin Mass. Bob Hudson, in The Newcastle Song, had made sly fun of it a few years earlier with his reference to Normie’s hotted-up FJ Holden with ‘chrome-plated grease nipples and double-reverse overhead twin-cam door handles’, a line that made my father burst out laughing when he heard it performed live on the Paul Hogan Show.

Whatever mystifying exchange of Sandmanalia went on between those petrolheads, though, it was clear to us girls what the major overriding difference between the Sandman models was. Some didn’t have the two side windows at the back, which left you scope for your painted surf mural. Others, by adding windows, took the car a step further from looking like a van a tradesman might conceivably use as a work vehicle. The only equipment those cars needed to carry was a surfboard and a mattress.

With the windows in place, the illusion was complete that the back of the van was more of a room. More of a mobile pad. A rather cramped bedsit, complete with curtains. The curtains could be drawn for privacy or open to allow admiring or scandalised peeks inside. When the rear door was thrown open, there was no mistaking that, in terms of interior decorating, you were looking at a boudoir – nay, a bordello – designed by someone suffering a surfeit of testosterone.

Boys would reach in and adjust the hang of those curtains with a gesture of care and tenderness they spent the remainder of their lives ruthlessly suppressing. Their bedrooms at home may have been pigsties, and they may have taken a perverse pride in being as slapdash and untidy as possible on their worksites, but they had clearly spent painstaking hours gluing that synthetic shag-pile carpet into precise alignment around the speaker cases on the walls. They were blokey slobs and proud of it, but sit on the bonnet of a Sandman with a tiny metal stud in the pocket of your jeans (Staggers or Amco Peaches) and they’d dart forward with a cry of dismay like a finicky maiden aunt. ‘No, no!’ they’d shrill an octave higher than usual, flapping their hands. ‘Watch the duco! The duco!’

It probably tells you enough about me as a teenager to hear that when I glanced nervously into those cars lined up at a beach car park, I didn’t see the promise of wild uninhibited sex by moonlight with a tanned surf god. Instead, I wondered who made those curtains. Were they factory standard features, hemmed and pintucked at Holden HQ, threaded in place by humming workers? Did the boys’ mums run them up on the Singer sewing machine, and did the guys choose the fabric? Before this mattress had been fitted, someone, clearly, had crawled awkwardly into the back with a tape measure and a dream, maybe a mouthful of pins and some fiddly brackets to install.

Listen to the song below to take you back.

Those boys would give us girls a promising leer as we hurried modestly past with our Pine Lime Splices, but instead of envisioning paradise by the dashboard light, I couldn’t help picturing them at home, carefully combing a mixture of lemon juice and Ajax into their hair to turn it suitably surfer-blond. There was something touching, feminine almost, in this image that stood in the way of the masculine magnetism they were so strenuously projecting, and I couldn’t shake it. I feared them, and feared the sullen predatory promise of what they were putting on display for us as they lounged around the open vans, but the thought of them furtively squeezing lemons and dabbing them onto those long fringes in front of the bathroom mirror at their parents’ place during the week just ate through my fantasy like rust.

I knew about the Ajax-and-lemon-juice mix from my sister who, despite sharing parents with me, was privy to way more mystifying insider information about such things. She knew what to aspire to, and what to scorn.

The Sandman’s allure as ultimate chickmagnet was so ubiquitous, though, that even I could see that there wasn’t an inch  of room for naivety. You knew what you were getting into if you dawdled in your bikinis past that knot of Jex-haired guys in boardshorts. Their cars lined coastal parking lots like surf-fishermen lined the beach itself, and their expressions seemed to mirror the fishermen’s – the steely single-minded grimness that said: bait and lure in place – now let’s see if they’re biting. You couldn’t say you didn’t know what you were in for when the bumper stickers read: If this van’s rockin’, don’t bother knockin’ and Don’t laugh – your daughter might be inside.

Even our parents knew the Sandmans were nicknamed Sin Bins and Shaggin’ Wagons.

‘Just never, ever get into one of those cars with one of those boys,’ our mother ordered. ‘Those rock apes drive like a bat out of hell,’ added my father, unwittingly quoting the title of the number one album of the time. ‘If you’re at some party, whatever time it is, ring me up and I’ll come and get you.’ He would, too, in his white Datsun. There was no chance of seeing in the dawn on a beach around a driftwood fire à la Sandman advertisement while my father was around.

The Sandman even seemed to have its own font for the decals – a font we laboriously copied on our school projects. It was iconic, gleaming, unapologetically sybaritic. No wonder guys circled the car like it was the Kaaba in Mecca. There it stood at the high golden end of the scale, the five-star score. Now all they had to do was arrange their Holdens and their hair, like bowerbirds arranging their bowers, and spend the day lounging on the tailgate, shirtless, waiting for fluttering females to be drawn irresistibly into range.

A whole glorious full-page-ad world awaited you if only you’d agree to climb aboard. There would be road trips into the sunset and a full tank of what the Amoco ads told us was nice clean petrol. Someone would know how to play the guitar as you lolled, laughing, around that fire in the evenings on the beach. The wind would blow your long blonde hair, and you would live on Chiko rolls and RC Cola and sing along to the radio. The older generation would fear you and all you represented, consumed with secret envy at your footloose carefree fullcolour rebellious life. The Sandman would take you there.

The cars were fitted usually with a roof rack for surfboards, but despite the hair, the board shorts, the Crystal Cylinders singlets, and even the subliminal iconography of ‘Sand’ and ‘Man’, I can’t recall ever witnessing any of those boys actually catching a wave. Maybe they’d already been surfing and had dried off by the time I turned up at the beach on Sunday clutching my Hawaiian Tropic Reef Oil and Kmart sunnies and Farrah Fawcett sun visor. Maybe they’d been out early in the morning, when I’d been getting driven to church by my dad in the Datsun 1200.

I would walk past, down to the beach steps, studiously avoiding eye contact, wishing I could banish the mental picture I had of those guys after the weekend was over, polishing their cars in a suburban driveway somewhere a long way from the beach. Lovingly, gently, they swipe the chamois over the photorealistic surfer poised forever in the glittering blue wave painted on the side mural. Their boardshorts hang dejectedly drying on the Hills Hoist. Their mum calls them from the house, reminding them that it’s bin night.

‘Jump in My Car,’ sang the Ted Mulry Gang on every radio. ‘I wanna take you home. C’mon, jump in my car – it’s too far to walk on your own.’

We loved that song, and we loved Ted. On Sunday nights at our house, my parents got their dose of pop culture by sitting down occasionally and, uninvited, watching Countdown with my sister and me.

They had a lot of trouble comprehending the maze of conflicting messages defining masculinity at the time, and looking back, I don’t blame them.

Those boys leaning on Holdens smelling like beer and petrol, desperate to deflower your teenage daughter – they were unambiguous masculinity personified. And yet, switch on your radio or TV, or sneak a look through your teenage daughter’s LPs, and there they were, the pop idols who looked like the diametric opposite of that archetype. They looked, in fact, like girls on the cover of a 1970s Playboy magazine.  Blow-dried, lip-glossed, mascaraed, lounging in soft-focus satin dressing gowns, they posed alluringly on cane couches and gave come-hither looks from album covers. Peter Frampton was way prettier than any girl I knew, and Leo Sayer, singing When I Need You, looked like an adorable dandelion-headed elf.

Mark Holden handed out longstemmed carnations in a white suit, which would have meant instant death in any Australian pub.

‘Even their names are girls’ names,’ said my father derisively as Skyhooks came on in full make-up. ‘Why’s he called Shirley, for crying out loud? And that one called Squeak? What is he, a dog toy?’

My mother eyed the singers we were meant to idolise, wriggling their skinny hips across the stage in satin bomber jackets and long flowing fringed scarves, singing, Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?

‘Well, I think “no” is pretty much the answer to that,’ she’d mutter flatly. Abba came on to close the show, and she studied the two men in the group, resplendent in their high heels and twinkling sequins. ‘That guy,’ she said of Björn, ‘looks like a gnome. He looks like something you’d put under your tap in the backyard.’

It was hard to admit your parents had a point, but they had a point. There didn’t seem to be an overabundance of swaggering testosterone on Countdown, just a pouting, gyrating Leif Garrett trying to convince us that he, too, had a car and did a lot of surfing, and an angelic Shaun Cassidy who didn’t look like he could handle a full-strength beer, let alone an HX. At the very same time as the new HJ Sandman panel vans were rolling off the production line at the Holden factory, The Bee Gees were singing How Deep Is Your Love? and there was a competition run by the Ted Mulry Gang fan club to win, not a date with Ted, but a pair of his handmade satin flared pants. I could see, perfectly, why my mother raised her eyebrows in silent disdain as we watched the band strut (‘flounce,’ said my mother pointedly) across the stage during the Jump in My Car clip.

It gave me a familiar, uneasy feeling of dissonance. If these guys in pastel satin vests and hand-stitched flares ended up talking you into letting them drive you home, I couldn’t help thinking they’d spend a fair while going through your wardrobe for accessories and asking to borrow your curling wand.

Anyway, even if they did, who on earth had parents broad-minded enough to let them stay the night? That was never going to happen. This was why the ownership of a car was so central to sexual conquests. There was simply nowhere else to go. Police were always banging on the doors of parked, steamed-up cars late at night, which may have explained how invariably rushed and furtive the action was inside.

The Sandman positively flaunted the fact that it was a customised bedroom on wheels, and any girl seen in one, our intensely nervous parents drilled us, would be marking herself as surely as if she’d got a tattoo across her forehead saying SLUT. Her future life as a teacher or nurse, not to mention as a proud married mother of their safely legitimate grandchildren, would be effectively over.

So where were we going to meet the man of our dreams? Which did you aspire to – the silent gruff machismo of the guy in the Sandman, or Andy Gibb telling you in a weird falsetto that he just wanted to be your everything? Between these two extremes, there was a giant black void in which no male specimen seemed to actually exist. Assembling a set of defining qualities to look for, an attraction based on actual personality, didn’t even occur to us.

‘Don’t worry, there are nice guys out there,’ said my mother, ‘but you’re not going to meet them in a pub, believe me.’

In the Sandman years, when the fusion of sex and car seemed at its zenith, guys didn’t even have to be nice. They didn’t have to be anything, other than in possession of a driver’s licence.

The company they preferred, infinitely, was each other’s. Their energy and devotion was expended on the car, not the girlfriend. The girl in the passenger seat was not the object of desire, she was a desirable accessory, like a hotdog muffler or custom wheels. Those boys didn’t have to develop any gallantry or charm or wit, or even courtesy – they barely had to speak. If they could stand upright unassisted and knew to keep their fly done up, they were a real catch. The cars – hotted up, carpeted, revving throatily like a subdued wild beast – were meant to woo us by proxy. The Age of Romance  had valiant knights on white chargers; we had to settle for Valiant Chargers. And they weren’t white. From memory, they were mostly burnt orange.

A few short years later – and how major the distance between 16 and 20 years old – I went to Tasmania on a holiday with my boyfriend. We hired the cheapest station wagon we could from the local renta-bomb, which was an old Holden Belmont that drove like a barge. The Franklin Dam protest was just getting underway, and because we had backpacks and a tent, were under 25 years old and, I don’t know, driving a green car, we weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms by the locals.

Rocks and handfuls of gravel were lobbed at the car in small towns on the west coast, and rolling slowly down the main street in the Belmont brought us many dark and hostile reactions. One night we pulled up late in a town our map said had a camping ground, and phoned the contact number from the public phone box at a deserted intersection to ask where the campground was.

‘You’re already in it,’ said the voice on the phone. ‘The park you’re standing in? That’s it.’

We looked around at the empty vacant lot behind the phone box. There was a concrete public toilet block in the corner.

‘I’ll come out and give you the key to the amenities,’ said the voice, and a minute later a middle-aged man walked across the street, handed us a key to the toilets and took twenty dollars off us. Another minute, and we were alone again, with a high-noon sense that many hidden narrowed eyes were observing us coldly from behind venetian blinds.

‘Let’s not set up the tent,’ said my boyfriend wearily. ‘Let’s just put the air beds in the back of the Holden and sleep in it, then get the hell out in the morning.’

We ate a can of baked beans, unlocked and used the amenities, and set up our bed in the back of the car. So this was it, I thought. As close as I’d ever get to the Sandman fantasy. On a road trip, with my boyfriend, free and dangerous and sleeping in the back of a Holden, born to be wild. In minutes, the car interior was swelteringly hot, and we kicked off our rustling nylon sleeping bags, sweaty and uncomfortable. We cranked down the rear and side windows for some ventilation, and almost immediately were bombarded by hundreds of mozzies. They made their way into the car like crazed fans swarming backstage at a Sherbet concert. They made that Belmont into their mosh pit.

We lay by torchlight, smacking them against the interior ceiling, alternately shutting the windows for relief, then opening them again to breathe, ushering in fresh waves of ravenous mosquitoes. The torch ran out of batteries, and they ate us alive. The night lasted forever. When dawn broke, we crawled out, stiff and exhausted, wishing we were anywhere else, wishing we were home with a shower, a decent coffee and some calamine lotion.

The day we dropped the hire car back, I stood watching while the guy did a quick condition report. The Holden’s paintwork was pockmarked with the chips and dents from the missiles thrown at us by surly locals, and the interior roof was a mass of tiny, bloody splats of crushed mosquito carcass.

I had a small, rare epiphany. Suddenly I wanted to buy that old workhorse of a car, and give it, and myself, another chance. I wanted a better road trip, I remember thinking, a wider, freer vista: music of the new decade on the stereo, an arm out the window and a couple of Dutch hitchhikers in the back. There was so much time still left to do it in – I was only 20, petrol was only thirty cents a litre, and the country was full of reliable old Holdens still running like a charm, cheap counter meals and a million exhilarating opportunities with new friends.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, I’d open the door on one of those cars and smell that familiar smell of hot vinyl and motor oil and Aerogard, and feel … itchy.

It’s the wide open road ahead that makes your restless heart beat faster; pedal to the metal and both hands on the wheel, steady as a rock.

Almost 20 years later, when I’m nearly 40 years old, I’m enjoying a weekend away at a farm with a big bunch of people. On the way home to the city, carpooling, a group of us are squeezed into a small Japanese car that chokes and dies. No worries, says a guy in the back seat I haven’t met before, he’ll jump out and hitch home to get another car and work out some towing for this one, and we can while away an hour or two at a handy nearby pub. For some reason I take this to mean he lives a stone’s throw away, rather than the 150 kilometres he hitchhikes to his home town.

Four hours later, he’s back to drive us all home. He rolls up outside the pub in a dark blue Holden HX Kingswood sedan, 1977 model, the same year those Sandman panel vans were rolling off the line at the factory, soaking up all the glory. The HX Kingswood sedan … well, I can’t say I ever noticed it at the time. This car has no decals, no mattress, no shag carpet glued lovingly to the interior walls. It’s a car you can sit back and feel instantly at home in, gazing out at the night sky. Three on the tree, front bucket seats and a bench in the rear, covered with terry-cloth seat covers crisped and bleached by years of honest sunshine beating in through the windscreen. There’s plenty of room for all our stuff, because in the back there’s just a spare, a fuel tin, a funnel, a spanner set, some rags, a jack, water and some antifreeze.

This guy, this unassuming knight in shining armor, has had the car since 1984, with few dramas except the one time it was stolen. We laugh and trade a few more stories. We drive back to his place, and without fuss or preamble he lends us his car to keep on driving back to the city.

Nothing showy, nothing gimmicky, nothing to prove. No customised paintwork, no hotted-up engine or mag wheels. Only an AM/FM radio and original speakers. But rock-solid, reliable, well maintained, running quietly and smoothly on all cylinders and let’s face it: that’s what you want, isn’t it, for a long trip?

Reader, I married him.

This is an extract from It Happened in a Holden, edited by Paddy O’Reilly, out now through Affirm Press $29.99

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