Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows a television advertisement from about 1976 for General Motors-Holden’s cars. It includes a montage of Australian icons such as the beach, the Australian flag, meat pies, koalas, kangaroos and Australian Rules football. These images are intercut with footage of people driving 1970s Holden cars including the Kingswood, Torana and Monaro models in a variety of typical Australian rural and urban locations. The upbeat music underscores a repetitive call-and-response jingle led by voice-artist Ken Sparkes.

Educational value points

• The advertisement is designed to appeal to a sense of patriotism by equating traditional and contemporary Australian cultural icons with the Holden, ‘Australia’s own car’. The rapid montage of images and the repetitive upbeat narration are constructed to evoke a positive emotional response allied with the sense of identifying as a ‘true blue’ Australian as represented by the familiar and everyday subjects shown.

• The clip includes features of the ‘ocker’ genre of advertising introduced in Australia in the 1970s. The pride in a new Australian nationalism promoted by prime minister Gough Whitlam (in office 1972–75) was evident in the cultural domain and popularised in film and art as a reaction to the ‘cultural cringe’, and was also taken up by the advertising industry. Advertisements following this trend used vernacular Australianisms and self-deprecatory larrikinism to promote Australian products.

• The advertisement presents an image of a white working-class Australia. However, the footage belies the actual cultural diversity of Australia in the mid-1970s. Large numbers of people from southern Europe had been immigrating since the end of the Second World War, and in the 1970s immigration from Asian countries was increasing. The White Australia policy that had restricted non-European migration was abolished in 1973.

• This advertisement uses a montage of quick repetitive shots to punctuate the accompanying jingle and build a visual collage of stereotypical Australian characters and landscape. Images are edited to the rhythm of the call-and-response jingle to create a sense of liveliness and to associate Holden with fun. ‘Montage’ is French for ‘assembly’ or ‘putting together’ and refers to the way an editor constructs a film, carefully selecting shots to create effects through juxtaposition.

• This advertisement was adapted from a US advertising campaign for the General Motors brand Chevrolet that used baseball, hot dogs and apple pie to appeal to the US audience’s national pride. The Holden campaign successfully localised the icons for an Australian audience to strike a patriotic chord. Consequently, ‘football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars’ has become one of the most memorable catchcries in Australian television advertising.

• Australian advertising agency George Patterson Pty Ltd (now George Patterson Y and R), the agency that handled all General Motors-Holden’s campaigns from 1948 to the 1980s, played an important role in establishing the Holden car in the national lexicon. George Patterson (1890–1968) began in newspaper and radio advertising and in 1934 formed George Patterson Pty Ltd, attracting many high-profile clients including Colgate-Palmolive and Gillette.