General Motors given incentives to set up expanding car plant at Elizabeth, north of Adelaide, from 1960
General Motors-Holden Elizabeth plant, at its peak, was producing a car every minute with three shifts operating around the clock.
South Australian premier Tom Playford was anxious in the 1950s to keep General Motors-Holden making cars in the state – and to be the industrial core of new satellite city of Elizabeth, north of Adelaide.
He was so anxious that he gave the land to General Motors-Holden’s before the state government even owned it, and he had to do some rapid negotiation to buy the property from a local farmer.
Playford also was rescuing South Australian industrial heritage. Holden was created by a family company that began as a 19th Century Adelaide saddlery and converted to car body building during World War I. In 1923, Holden's Motor Body Builders expanded from King William Street to a new factory at Woodville.
Company chairman Edward Holden signed an exclusive deal to build General Motors bodies in Australia. New General Motors plants were built in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth where the complete cars were assembled using Australian-made bodies and imported engines and chassis. By 1929, Holden was employing 3,500 and was the largest car body builder in the British commonwealth. Then the Great Depression hit. In 1930, it made 34,000 cars. A year later, only 1,600.
The post-World War II vision of Laurence Hartnett and the Ben Chifley’s Labor federal government, for a car designed and made in Australia for Australian conditions, resulted in the Holden FX that rescued the company over the misgivings of General Motors head office in the United States.
Playford had to entice General Motors to stay in South Australia in the 1950s with incentives such as the free site at Elizabeth. Designed to be a model car plant with lawns, fountains and trees, the Elizabeth GMH factory opened in 1960. The workforce, along with the many English migrants who settled in Elizabth, was a mix of cultures: Scots, Irish, Italian, German, Greek, Yugoslav. Well organised beneath the impression of noisy chaos, the Elizabeth plant at its peak was building 240 bodies a day, with a car coming off the line every minute. By 1962, the millionth Holden was produced.
The Elizabeth plant grew to be so large it has its own streets named after famous car models like Torana and Commodore. In its heyday, when three shifts worked around the clock, it even had its own bank and a big social programme of concerts and other entertainment for the employees.