Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

provided by

This black-and-white clip shows a 1967 television advertisement for the Holden HR station sedan. The clip opens with a paper boy delivering The Age newspaper to a suburban family home on a Saturday morning, followed by scenes of family errands and activities carried out using the family Holden car – grocery shopping, taking children to sport, going to the hardware store and having a weekend away. The clip is accompanied by a jingle that features the refrain ‘It’s a Saturday kind of car’. A male voice-over details the car’s family-friendly features.

Educational value points

• This advertisement indicates the centrality of the suburban family unit to the expansion of the Australian automotive industry in the 1960s. In the marketing strategy for its HR station sedan (station wagon), General Motors-Holden’s (GMH) positions it as a versatile vehicle suited to all the family’s weekend needs – perfect, as the narrator says, ‘for families on the go’.

• To present the car as a desirable product, the clip uses an idealised image of a comfortable 1960s family life in which happy families, helpful community members and friendly neighbours live together in a safe suburban environment. It associates buying the car with owning a home, raising a family and having a secure job – an ideal for many people at the time and one that is still dominant in Australia today.

• The assumptions about discrete gender roles implicit in the advertisement reflect some of the traditional social values commonly accepted in the 1950s and 60s, many of which were being actively challenged by the feminist movement. In the clip the gender roles within the family unit are clearly delineated with the mother and daughter shown shopping and the father taking boys to football and then visiting the hardware store to buy materials for working on the house.

• The advertisement uses a constantly repeated slogan, ‘It’s a Saturday kind of car’, to associate owning a Holden car with the fixed experience of weekend leisure time of the average 1960s family. The clip opens with a catchy jingle and the slogan ‘It’s a Saturday kind of car’ and builds its refrain. The singer repeats the word ‘Saturday’ three times in the middle and towards the end of the clip: ‘It’s a Saturday, Saturday, Saturday kind of car’.

• In the late 1950s, the 6-cylinder station sedan accounted for more than one-third of Holden sales and its popularity only increased during the 1960s with the nation’s growing prosperity and ability to travel. Today, with concerns about rising petrol costs, global economic trends and environmental problems, smaller vehicles (3–4 cylinder engines) are becoming a more viable option for consumers and now make up the majority of private car sales in Australia.

• The GMH company, now known as GM Holden Ltd, was originally established as a saddlery and leathergoods business in Adelaide in 1856 by James Alexander Holden (1835–87), evolving into a mass manufacturer of car bodies. In 1931 General Motors-Holden’s was formed when the biggest US car manufacturer, General Motors, bought the company that was by then called Holden’s Motor Body Builders.