"We love football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars" was the jingle from the ad in 1976, featuring a montage of outdoor scenes, sporting events, native fauna and the Aussie flag trumpeting the fact that Holden was Australia's own car. In the late 1990s, one in every five vehicles sold was a Holden, with nearly all manufactured here. In 2020, the iconic Holden car brand was put out to pasture by General Motors.

No one should be surprised by Holden's demise, it has been on the cards for nearly 40 years. In the early 1980s, Senator John Button created the "Motor Industry Development Plan" or, as it was known, the "Button car plan". It saw a rationalisation of the Australian car industry, reducing the number of cars made locally to six, supposedly to make manufacture more efficient and better able to compete as the import tariffs reduced.

It didn't work, as no one wanted to buy a Toyota with a Holden badge on it. As the import tariffs dropped, many car manufacturers became importers only. It opened the floodgates to other car manufacturers to import cars, with almost 50 car brands importing 150 different models of cars into the Australian market.

Eventually, the government could not justify the billions of dollars they were pumping into making cars in Australia, and they withdrew their support. With our growing appetite for SUVs and fewer barriers to accessing the globalised car market, car manufacture was dead in Australia by 2017.

The writing has been on the wall for Holden for many years. When General Motors brought it to an end, they were Holden on, no more.