In Search Of The Holden Piazza

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Author: Chris Warr | Joe Kremzer

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In Search of the Holden Piazza


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In Search of the Holden Piazza Chris Warr & Joe Kremzer


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First published in 2006 Copyright © Chris Warr & Joe Kremzer 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Warr, Chris. In search of the Holden Piazza. ISBN 9781741146301. ISBN 174114 630 5. 1. Holden automobiles - History. 2. Automobiles Australia - History. I. Kremzer, Joe. II. Title. 629.2222 Set in 11/15 pt Rotis by Bookhouse, Sydney Printed by in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


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Contents Contents

About the authors

vii

Acknowledgements

xi

Authors’ note

xiii

Introduction

xvi

1

‘Piazza is a penthouse of pleasure and performance.’ 1

2

‘Piazza. Even its Italian name quickens your pulse.’ 10

3

‘The driver’s seat alone is a miracle.’

30

4

‘When you’ve settled in the seat, you behold an eye-filling array.’

42

5

‘Holden Piazza. The name says it all.’

53

6

‘Take a fast, sweeping curve and you discover this is no boulevarde show-car.’

76 v


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‘Piazza is fully imported, in limited numbers, and unusual in more ways than one.’

8 ‘Your adrenalin really flows when you turn the ignition key.’ 9 ‘Piazza—an overpriced understatement.’

91 98 120

10 ‘The driver is confronted by no fewer than 20 warning and function lights, all of them easy to interpret.’

136

11 ‘Just sitting in it is pure pleasure.’

152

12 ‘Driving it is a dimension beyond pleasure.’

168

13 ‘The vision of it standing, aloof and alive, in your driveway.’

177

14 ‘Holden Piazza abounds with temptations.’

195

15 ‘“Inspired” is one of the few adequate descriptions of the Piazza.’

211

Epilogue: ‘Maybe the word isn’t ‘inspired’. Perhaps it’s genius.’

215

Appendix 1: Holden Piazza Technical Details

217

Appendix 2: RACT Inspection Report

220

Appendix 3: Australia’s Piazzas

225

Appendix 4: Alliterated West Indian Test Cricketers

227


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About the authors About the authors

Christopher Michael Warr Chris was born in Hobart on 21 August 1978 and after convincing himself he wasn’t a factory reject (as purported by his brother and sister), enjoyed his childhood and time at school. Never wavering from his burning desire to become a leading sports journalist, Chris studied economics and found himself working for Tasmania’s Department of Treasury and Finance—where he reads the sports pages of the newspapers with unbridled enthusiasm. While Chris may not have ended up writing about sport, he sure has tried playing a lot of it. Often changing sports year to year, Chris would follow announcements of retirement from one sport with bold vii


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statements of his intentions of taking up another. Until someone quietly pointed out that only champions retire, crap people give up. Chris also harbours an unhealthy obsession with Neil Finn, the only person he would want at a candlelit dinner party . . . fictitious or real. He is also the singer-songwriting component of The Vacationers, a band who’s meteoric rise from humble weekly beginnings in Chris’s bedroom has seen them move into Chris’s lounge room where they continue to perform on a fortnightly basis. Chris currently drives a 1991 Ford Corsair with a pin stripe, a model most likely to be seen in bowls club car parks around the country (sans stripe). Most importantly, it should be noted that Chris and Joe once had a dismal beard-growing contest while surviving earthquakes and skiing in New Zealand. With a week’s head start Joe won easily; however, it was definitely not a win for proponents of hirsute people in general.

Jozef (Joe) Stanislaw Kremzer Joe was born in Hobart on 15 August 1978, and spent his formative years in the working class suburb of Claremont. Surrounded by tyre-less Geminis on blocks, kids with rat’s tails and chain-smoking mothers in unfeasibly tight denim, Joe explored a number of undertakings—sporting, creative and academic—in order to find his place in the world. For a while Joe thought his future might lie in physiotherapy, but, after almost passing out whilst observing a varicose vein removal, he soon realised he was destined


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About the authors ix

for the public service. Content to leave the high-flying world of sports care and accident rehabilitation to those of more rigid constitutions, Joe took shelter in the bloodless world of Treasury and Finance. Juggling a full-time career and a passion for obscure lowlights in Australian motoring history isn’t easy. Everyone knows about the Leyland P76 and the 1990s Ford Capri, but it takes true passion and commitment to unearth the finer points of such true showroom dreams as Holden’s Scurry, Drover and of course the ubiquitous Piazza. Joe fled the Treasury after six years, but found it hard to leave the public service and get a job in the real world, and so he took up energy policy positions with various state governments. In his precious spare time Joe enjoys watching B-grade movies and television, reading, playing hockey and pursuing dreams of escaping the mindless drudgery of the bureaucracy for a life of rock and roll, playing bass with The Vacationers and anyone else who will let him jam with them. Joe has fulsome sideburns and, contrary to some reports, is able to grow a proud and bushy beard when required.

To see photos from the Piazza quest go to <www.piazzasearch.com>.


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Acknowledgements

The biggest thanks for this book goes to Scott Harthen who provided endless assistance to us from the night we drunkenly raised the concept with him right through to organising meetings for us at Holden and procuring the odd Monaro for us to drive. Thanks also to Tom Rundle whose expert web design skills, time and patience enabled us to contact, keep in contact with, and be contacted by Piazza owners, media and friends. Scotty Mac, thanks for helping us find Alyce. Immense cheers to Peter Lockley for his mechanical expertise, ensuring that Alyce was ready and raring to go for our trip. To Cary Young and his wife Lyn, thank you for your amazingly generous hospitality and assistance. Without Cary and his incredible achievements on ‘Sale of the Century’, it’s likely this book may never have been written. xi


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Obviously a massive thank you to all the wonderful Piazza owners who were so generous with their time and told us about their cars and their lives. Thanks also to Rach and Zane, Greg Goodwin, David Rose and Jennifer McKenzie from RACT, Peter Hellier, Judith Lucy and all at Fox FM, Lynn Hawkes and everyone at the ABC Hobart, and ABC local radio around Australia. Thank you to all at Holden who provided valuable information and assistance to us from day one. Thanks to Scott, Tom, Kate, Axe, Jen, Prong, Marcus, Webbs, Clarkey, Mikey C, Esther, Ryan, Belinda, Drum, Hilary, Jason, Sandra, Garath and Danni for their amazing hospitality along the way—we were never short of a beer and bed, couch or piece of carpet to sleep on. Eternal thanks to our families, friends and long-suffering girlfriends Megan and Danni. We would like to thank the original Holden Piazza sales brochure for so eloquently providing the chapter titles for our book. Huge thanks to Jo Paul, Lauren Finger and Catherine Milne and the rest of the team at Allen & Unwin for helping us belt this shambles into shape. Finally, we wish to express our gratitude to those who undertook similarly indulgent and ridiculous quests before us, providing inspiration and evidence that alcohol and stupidity can actually produce something, albeit something that is not necessarily important—Dave Gorman, Danny Wallace, Tony Hawks, we owe you a beer.


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Authors’ note

We would like to briefly point out how much of a burden it was to be responsible for uncovering what happened to the Holden Piazza. So much so that it took two of us to undertake the journey around Australia and write this book. Just so that the people appearing in this book can work out which one of us to sue for libel, we have made it easy for you. I, Chris, will write in this font. I guess that means that I, Joe . . . you get the idea. While some details in the following pages may have been fudged when the facts were a little blurred due to fatigue and/or inebriation, all the stories are true (except of course those which make our family, partners, friends and employers a little ashamed to know us). xiii


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Introduction Introduction

‘Okay, now as we head to fast money, Cary is on $90, Gwen is sitting on $45 and Simon is on $65, 60 seconds on the clock . . . your time starts now. Which country’s currency is the zloty . . .’ The unmistakeable Tony Barber. ‘Er, Poland.’ I was eight, it was 1986, and in lounge rooms around the country Australians were glued to their TV sets watching the ostensibly unbeatable Cary Young compete on ‘Sale of the Century’, the world’s richest quiz. Sure it was exciting, with the bright lights, the seemingly impossible questions, the ‘famous faces’ and, while I probably hadn’t worked it out yet, the rather saucy Alyce Platt. But for me, the highlight would come at the end of the show. xvi


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Cary cruised home to win by $55. Gwen and Simon graciously accepted their hideous, and hideously overvalued, consolation diamond memento stickpins and Cary went ‘shopping’. There in the showroom, amongst other equally shiny prizes, was what I had been eagerly waiting for, a brand new Holden Piazza. Meanwhile, in a lounge room elsewhere in the sleepy little island state of Tasmania, I was cheering on the great man as he strove for victory. There was a lot at stake for Cary: the ‘Sale’ World Championship, a handsome array of prizes and a cash jackpot. But as far as this buck-toothed, bowl-cut sporting 8year-old was concerned, the Titan of Trivia had achieved so much more than ultimate victory on Australia’s richest game show— Cary Young, the world’s greatest quiz master, had just earned the right to drive away in a brand new black Holden Piazza. As a child growing up in Hobart’s northern suburbs, I had little choice but to be a car nut. Bathurst was our Mecca and the deity we worshipped was called Brock. The only problem was that I was a geek. I knew nothing about cars except that black ones looked cool although red ones always went faster. As the saying goes, I didn’t know art, but I knew what I liked. I figured that the same applied to cars. I took one look at the Piazza and I knew that one day I would drive one. It was black, a definite plus, a Holden, so my mates would approve, and did someone say turbo? I had no idea what that was, but it made it go faster, right? Sadly, however, when I told my friends about the example of automotive genius that would one day be mine, most were unenthusiastic, at best, or had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.


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xviii In Search of the Holden Piazza I lived with the hidden shame of being a Piazza lover for nearly a decade until fate and apathy led me into the Tasmanian public service at the same time as a young man named Chris, my friend and co-author, or if you will, the charming and charismatic Tony Barber to my stylish and oh-so-sexy Alyce. Since we started on a cadetship program with the Department of Treasury and Finance some years ago, Chris and I have been flatmates, shared the success of the ‘Norms’ 6th grade touch football team, taken the odd ill-advised skiing holiday to earthquake prone parts of the world, and shared dreams of rock and roll fame. And while we have a lot in common, one trait stands out—we are both keen enthusiasts of pointless crap (the technical term is ‘spermologist’, but that just sounds plain wrong). Many a night has been spent at the pub discussing some of the most useless facts known to man. Which may go some way to explaining our limited luck with the ladies . . . Classic topics for discussion have included the post-1927 career of Oz Rocker Eric Weideman, the Blakeney twins, and the old stalwart, the alliterated names of West Indian test cricketers (see Appendix 4). Trying to think of them all, from Barrington Browne through Corey Collymore and Cameron Cuffy right up to the great Sven ‘Conrad’ Stayers, once got us most of the way through a road trip from Melbourne to Adelaide. Although not everyone is keen to join in these rather specialised conversations, one topic that is guaranteed to get people talking is ‘Sale of the Century’. Debate has raged as to whether or not Nikki Buckley should have been hosting while heavily pregnant (for the record the authors always supported Nikki on this one), or who was the greatest Champion of Champions (no guessing


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Introduction xix who got our vote), and there was one rather heated discussion on the merits of picking the home viewer on the fame game board. Of course, it was ‘Sale’ that brought us together. When the words ‘Sale of the Century’ were first uttered at a public service morning tea, I was shocked when Chris, the other dazed and confused looking new starter, echoed my call to arms for the Holden Piazza. We were in turn greeted with blank stares from our fellow public servants in the room. The awkward silence eventually broken by a chorus of ‘Holden what??!!’. But my spirits would not be dampened; I recognised that in Chris I had at last found a man who shared my dream. For those new to the Holden Piazza or requiring a brush up, here’s a quick primer: The Holden Piazza was released in Australia by General-Motors Holden Ltd, as its pride-and-joy sports car, on April Fools’ Day 1986. Dodgy internet research reveals that around 300 new Holden Piazzas were sold in Australia between 1986 and 1987. Even dodgier internet research (discretion is required when searching on-line for information on cars, especially the Ford Probe) suggests that less than 80 are still driving on (or permanently parked near) Australian roads today. The Holden Piazza was designed by Italy’s Giorgetto Giugiaro. Giugiaro had been experimenting with variations of a wedgeshaped vehicle (following the heralded yet strangely unconfirmed success of his design of a triangular doorstop in the 1950s). By the late 1970s a highly acclaimed prototype named the ‘Ace of Clubs’, was to become the Isuzu Piazza—later to be unleashed on the unsuspecting Australian public as the Holden Piazza (Giugiario apparently named a number of his designs after playing


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xx In Search of the Holden Piazza cards—some critics might sugget that the Joker would have been a more appropriate moniker for the Piazza). The Piazza came to our shores with a prohibitive price tag of nearly $35 000—roughly the price of two Holden Commodores with a Barina thrown in for good measure. However, your money did get you an extraordinary number of added features for the time. These included, but were by no means limited to, contoured velour seats with an inordinate number of adjustable lumbar thingies, electronic digital instrumentation, cruise control, fourspeaker stereo cassette with a seven-band graphic equaliser, an airconditioner featuring a fancy climate control lever, and power windows, steering, mirrors and door locks. The Holden sales brochure which accompanied the Piazza’s launch summed up the sumptuous interior: ‘Just sitting in it is pure pleasure. Driving it is a dimension beyond pleasure.’ Powering this ‘dimension beyond pleasure’ was a 2-litre turbo engine which Holden declared on a race circuit ‘could propel you through five silky gears, all the way up to 200 km/h, with dazzling acceleration all the way.’ But despite the aerodynamics, the inviting interior and the powerful performance, the Piazza had a somewhat troubled introduction onto the local motoring scene. Much maligned, it was held back by its exorbitant cost, a suspension system not suited to Australian speed humps and a competitive market filled with a plethora of classy wedge-bonneted sports cars. Not surprisingly the Holden Piazza was soon forgotton by the motoring public. Until that fateful department morning tea brought back hidden memories of Cary Young’s shiny new black Piazza glittering away on the ‘Sale’ showroom floor. As is the


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Introduction xxi way with great adventures, Chris and I didn’t know at the time that something signficant was about to happen . . . Fast forward to New Year’s Eve, nearly five years after Joe and I had first discovered our mutual admiration for the forgotten. A few drinks and talk (obviously amongst the really cool people of the party) invariably turned to the Holden Piazza. One drink led to another, which in turn led to some interesting cocktails, and before we had seen in the New Year the quest had begun. ‘Let’s go in search of the Holden Piazza,’ I said to Joe. ‘Let’s go in search of the Holden Piazza in a Holden Piazza.’ ‘Of course,’ slurred Joe. Normally my friend’s vocabulary after a few beverages consists chiefly of the phrases ‘I love you mate’ and ‘Have a go arsehole’, so this clearly articulated response was proof enough for me that this was something we would both remember in the morning. Under the influence it all seemed so clear and simple. Joe and I would track down the few remaining Holden Piazzas, meet their owners and traverse our beautiful country in between. However, in reality, a few minor details had to be dealt with before we could go in search of Piazzas in our very own Piazza—firstly, we had to get one. Owners of the wedged beauty weren’t going to take us seriously if we rocked up in a Leyland P76, a Lada Niva, a Nissan Junior or even a Holden Scurry. We had to be driving our own example of the most exotic of Australian motoring flops, the Holden Piazza. This, however, posed something of a problem. Buying a Piazza wasn’t as easy as we first thought—


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they are difficult enough to find throughout Australia without limiting our search to Tasmania. Still, Tasmania was as good a place to start as any and it had come to our attention that a Holden Piazza lurked close by in a Hobart wreckers. The excitement was palpable as we turned into the car park of the wreckers—Joe and I had never before been so close to a Piazza in the flesh. The manager, who appeared somewhat bemused by our quest, led us through a maze of interconnected sheds before pointing us to a rickety stand-alone corrugated iron structure near the back of the yard. Here we found a white Piazza sitting under what looked to be years of dust and grime and an assortment of parts. What stood out most to Joe and I at this first Piazza meeting was just how well the style and shape of the car had fared in the preceding two decades. Sitting low to the ground, the two-door coupe was a picture of sleek aerodynamics. We forced open the large low-slung doors and hopped inside for a closer look. We were instantly struck by the smart-looking dashboard and surrounds. Along with the array of buttons, dials and thingamabobs we also noticed how roomy the cabin was. Reminiscent of Dr Who’s Tardis, inside the Piazza had ample leg room even for the tallest of drivers and plentiful interior space to delay the onset of cabin fever on those long drives. Well, we thought the Piazza was roomy but quickly discovered that the front seats had been removed and Joe and I were in fact sitting in the back seat. Once the excitement of seeing our first Piazza had worn off we were able to identify a few other anomalies. Closer inspection revealed


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that the low profile of the car was actually the result of all four wheels being missing and that the engine and gearbox had also been removed. These omissions meant that Joe and I quickly abandoned any preposterous thoughts that we may have previously had of tightening some bolts, adding some oil and driving that Piazza right on out of the yard and into the sunset. With the white Piazza unable to meet the strict cirteria we had set for our quest’s transport (i.e. something that goes) we expanded our search to the remainder of the country. I literally spent months (sitting at my desk at work) searching car sale sites on the internet for a Piazza in which to undertake our journey. I even stumbled across a nice-looking example on eBay where bids had only reached $1250. Hurriedly, before bidding closed, I emailed the seller to obtain a few more details. Just those minor things any prospective car buyer might need to know when weighing up a purchase. Does it come with car mats? Will you throw in a key ring? Would the car make it around Australia? While the seller was happy to confirm the first two questions, he was unable to come to the party on the third. His brutally honest assessment was that the car would not be fit for a lap of the country and would probably require a complete engine rebuild. Joe and I quickly realised that we couldn’t afford the time nor the money to undertake such an ambitious project. We would need to find a car in a slightly better mechanical shape. As luck would have it, and in true Tasmanian style (where there are one and a half degrees of separation as opposed to the usual six or seven), a friend of mine at work—well,


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actually my friend’s flatmate’s boyfriend who happened to be a mechanic—had worked on a Piazza before. Anyway, as luck would really have it, said mechanic knew that said Piazza had come up for sale in Devonport in the north of the state. Before going into the finer details of the high-powered negotiations undertaken in order to procure our new vehicle, I should give you a sense of my track record in this department. Unfortunately I had a bit of bad luck purchasing my first-ever car—a beautiful blue 1983 Ford Telstar TX5. Being the sensible lad that I was, I knew it was prudent to get a full inspection of the vehicle prior to handing over my hard-earned $4800. Following the aforementioned comprehensive inspection the mechanic walked up to me and said: ‘Nah mate don’t go near it, I wouldn’t touch it with a 40-foot pole.’ To this day I’m not sure exactly which part of that sentence I didn’t understand but I swear I heard him say: ‘Gee, I wish I had the money, I’d buy it myself.’ Clearly I had been blinded by the blue interior, the sports suspension button (that may or may not have done something very exciting) and the intriguing array of warning tones and jingles which let me know that my lights were on, the door was open and/or the car was about to spontaneously combust. Not long after my amazingly inspired purchase, travelling along the highway, I heard my mobile phone ring. I looked around to find it—but I didn’t yet own a mobile phone. It was then that the car slowly ground to a halt and never went (at any great speed) again. The mechanic’s advice resonated more clearly in the weeks and months that followed


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as I emptied my bank account, and that of my parents, into my dream machine. So I was determined not to make the same mistake with the purchase of the Piazza. So determined in fact that I decided that we wouldn’t bother with a pre-purchase inspection at all—far more sensible to get one after we bought the car. We bought our red 1986 Holden Piazza with just 244 000 kilometres on the clock from Damien for $3400. Damien was a relaxed, confident 19-year-old baker from Devonport who assured me, amongst many other things, that it was a great car for ‘what it was’. What it was, our post-purchase vehicle inspection revealed, was a car in need of a lot of work. The inspection report makes up the bulk of this book (Appendix 2) with 55 separate items identified as requiring attention. And that was in addition to the usual attention: spending time with it, asking how it was occasionally and giving it a friendly pat on the bonnet every now and again. Short on money and shorter on time we decided to prioritise what needed to be done on the car in readiness for our sojourn. Certainly important were new brakes, clutch fluid and even a spot of welding necessary to bring the car up to Albanian used-car standards, but these were nowhere near as important as securing our very own over-priced, personalised, Tasmanian ‘PIAZZA’ number plates. Now some might argue that we should have got the car’s airconditioning fixed, or perhaps sorted out the steering and suspension problems before heading off. They might even suggest some quality tyres may have been handy. To them we say, ‘Yes. You are absolutely right.’


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xxvi In Search of the Holden Piazza I was on holiday in Sydney when Chris called to say he’d not only tracked down our dream machine but purchased it, so I didn’t get to experience the magic until a few days later. Words cannot describe my emotions as I walked around the corner of the car park to where Chris had our shiny (in places), cock-eyed machine waiting. It was a feeling similar to one I’d experienced a week or so earlier when we caught a glimpse of our first real, live Piazza in a Hobart auto-salvage centre. Only this time was different, this one was ours. And this one had a few handy little extras that the one we’d previously inspected was lacking: four wheels, an engine, gearbox, seats, etc. You know, the little touches that make a car special. Chris proceeded to give me the Piazza owner’s orientation, a rite of passage handed down to him just days earlier by Damien. The orientation was a checklist of little things to be aware of when driving the Piazza: • The rear window is only partially attached and prone to flapping in the breeze or on rough roads. • Ditto for the front guard (although I’d wager that the bolts to this were lost quite recently given the panel’s lustrous shine when compared with the rest of the car). • The little clasp which locks into place to prevent the bonnet from flying open whilst travelling had been tucked into the interior armrest for safekeeping. Presumably the previous owner thought it might save time when opening and closing the bonnet. (Given that the only time the bonnet of any of my previous vehicles was opened was when it was done by a trained professional on a six-monthly basis as required by


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Introduction xxvii warranty, the necessity to have such easy access to the engine was a worrying sign.) • The central unlocking was fully functional; however, the central locking was not, requiring the driver to manually lock all doors when alighting from the vehicle. • The hand brake had to be applied with two hands by manually locking the latch into place after pulling up the lever. I drove around town for about ten minutes with Chris in the passenger seat. I think he was a bit nervous about letting me loose with our new investment, but I made a point of indicating and braking early and generally driving like my insurance company, and any passenger, would probably like me to. After proving myself worthy of taking our new beast home for the night, I dropped Chris off at his place before seeing exactly what this baby was capable of. Having previously despised the 19-year-old kids that tear about town in their tricked-up Subaru WRXs and Nissan Skylines, I finally felt a kinship with them as I revved the guts out of our metallic beast (at least I think I did, the orientation session did not mention that the digital tacho was not working) and dumped the clutch, all set to rocket off with the sound of rubber screeching on asphalt ringing in my ears. The little bus certainly had more pick up from a standing start than any of my previous cars, but that was not the source of my new found affinity with the 19year-olds and their Japanese imports. No, our sudden bonding can be summed up with one simple (and newly made up) onomatopoeia—PFFFFSSSSSSSTTT. Never had I realised the joy one experiences listening to that sound again and again while changing through gears. When


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xxviii In Search of the Holden Piazza handled roughly, our little jalopy had the hiss of the turbo, if not the paint job, of the shiniest WRX or Skyline on Hobart’s roads. Up until now I haven’t divulged the details of the rigorous trials the car was subjected to for fear that I would be in hot water with Chris had I managed to destroy it before we even left Hobart. Needless to say, however, the Piazza well and truly passed muster. I loved its smooth acceleration, the bouncy suspension and the alarming nosedive under braking. I’ve never claimed to be a great driver (as my insurance company would attest) and the Piazza is really not a car for someone who brakes late, turns too hard and spends far too much time rubbernecking at the pinstripesuited women strolling up Macquarie Street. But somehow, after just a couple of short (and very quick) blocks, I knew that this was the car for me. This feeling was taken to knew heights by the discovery of the lumbar controls on the seats (a must-have for two decrepit public servants well past their athletic peaks) and the somewhat prophetic Picture magazine stashed under the front seat (for the uninitiated Picture is the classy weekly softpornography publication of choice for those who want a classy weekly soft-pornography publication). At the very least we had something to read in the event we got stranded in the middle of nowhere waiting for roadside assistance to show up. Now that we had our very own Piazza we were pretty much ready to go. Actually, that’s far from true, but if the word ‘halfarsedness’ ever makes it into the Macquarie Dictionary the definition will simply feature a picture of Chris and me sitting behind the wheel of our lopsided little cruiser. Getting our Piazza ready for the arduous voyage ahead was somewhat akin to an Amish barn raising; with friends, neighbours


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Introduction xxix and hangers-on all eager to help out where possible. It turned out, however, that some vital players in our quest for roadworthiness were not as committed as they seemed, as is evidenced by the exchange that occurred between myself and a representative of the aforementioned auto-salvage yard where we first witnessed the glory of Piazza. Our Piazza came sans front grille, giving it a rather toothless smile to go with its lazy-eyed visage. However, the Piazza in the Hobart wreckers did have one, so I called them to find out its price. When I spoke to the head wrecker, I mentioned the fact that doing us a good deal would result in publicity worth untold millions in the form of a good wrap in the future best-seller In Search of the Holden Piazza. So I was somewhat shocked and stunned when informed that the grille could indeed be ours, at a cost of $125. The salesman justified this price by informing me that his was the only place in Tasmania we would be able to find one. Although from his perspective this was flawless logic, I quickly countered by pointing out that we were the only people in Tasmania who would want to buy one. He succumbed, charged me $25 and wished us the best of luck on our quest. While we were priming ourselves and our Piazza for a glorious departure, Joe and I sought the permission of our respective employers to undertake our journey. It was nearly as difficult convincing our bosses as it was ourselves that this, our search for the Holden Piazza, was a sensible thing to do and worthy of time off. Still, they begrudgingly conceded that the state could continue to function without us and duly granted us 10 weeks leave. The only downside to this from our perspective was that the majority of it would be unpaid. Following some expert assistance from a retired mechanic


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who attended to the more important items on our inspection list, like brakes, we were able to ‘show-off ’ the red wedge on wheels at our official Piazza Search launch party on the last Sunday afternoon before our departure. Just what we were launching we weren’t entirely sure yet, but the sun shone, the beer flowed and we ate a specially prepared cake in the shape of a red Holden Piazza. Around this time I got a call late one night from Joe suggesting that it was remiss of us to embark on such a huge undertaking in the Piazza without giving it a name. Although it is tradition to give ships female names, I’m not sure the same applies to cars. Actually, most people seem to think that naming cars at all is pretty pointless but, nonetheless, our other cars are both very blokey (at least in name): Murray Mazda and Corey Corsair. It was, however, pretty evident that our new car should have a girl’s name. Those who had seen our Piazza had said things like ‘wow she’s really . . . something’ and ‘are her panels supposed to be different shades of red?’ So with her gender decided Joe quite rightly put it to me that there was only one appropriate moniker: Alyce, in honour of ‘Sale’ assistant to Tony Barber during the Piazza’s reign as major prize, Alyce ‘Sparky’ Platt. The few days prior to our departure were spent frantically trying to work out what one might need while driving around Australia looking for obscure motor vehicles. The CD selection was clearly the highest priority and also the most difficult one—would I need both ‘The Best of the Mamas and Papas’ and ‘the Mamas and the Papas Live in New York in 1982’? The short period before leaving was also spent trying to come to terms with our new found and burgeoning media


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profile. While I had experienced press before—after all my name was in the small sports results section of the local paper as one of only three goal kickers in the Sandy Bay Football Club’s 139 point loss in the Under 18’s round 14 game against New Norfolk in 1995—I’m not sure that I was prepared for the level of media interest in our self-indulgent quest. By the time we were ready to leave, there had been articles in most of the major dailies around the state and the country, and we’d done radio interviews with the likes of Red Symons, Judith Lucy and Peter Hellier. Raising the profile of our search was not the only major benefit of the media interest—we started hearing from people who actually owned Piazzas, as well as people wanting to tell us about the one their mate’s uncle’s butcher used to have back in 1991. People contacted us to report spottings in car parks and let us know which motoring magazine articles the Piazza had appeared in. This thing was getting big. There were also emails pointing out the obscure places people had seen the Piazza. For instance, for some unknown reason the Piazza was the car of choice for the diagrammatic representation illustrating the ground clearance requirements for passenger vehicles under Rule 67(3) of Western Australia’s Road Traffic (Vehicle Standards) Rules 2002. The Piazza is also apparently available for purchase in the early rounds of the worldwide smash-hit car racing game ‘Gran Turismo 4’. But without doubt our favourite email was from a previous Piazza aficionado who, in great detail, described the impact the Piazza had had on his life. Our correspondent, let’s call him Steve, had leased a brand new Piazza in 1987. He was quick to point out that his


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Piazza was a fabulous car, which initially gave him much joy. The joy being that the car introduced him to his wife, who allegedly wanted to go out with ‘the guy with the hot car’. Seemingly even more joy followed as some 18 years later, they are happily married with two children. But, like all great passions, with joy comes an opposite and equal—or in this case a disproportionately greater—amount of sorrow. The sorrow being that the car was repossessed by the bank when Steve couldn’t keep up the prohibitive lease repayments. At the time he still owed $21 000 on the lease and the book value of the Piazza was $20 000. As Steve had to make up the difference he (wrongly) thought he would only be exposed to a relatively small $1000 shortfall. However, the bank kindly sold the car on his behalf for a mere $8000 leaving our poor Piazza lessee with a $13 000 liability. Steve was devastated and unable to pay, so the bank took him to court. But as luck would have it Steve knew, and played cricket with, the clerk of the court and, as a result, received a judgement of $50 per month at an interest rate of 0 per cent. Incredibly, as you read this, our friend is still paying for the Piazza. Compounding the hurt at the time, a few months after the car had been repossessed Steve had a call from a woman looking to buy it from a used-car yard. As Steve was listed as the previous owner, she called him seeking some details of the Piazza’s past. The price listed for the car was $22 000. Not all our correspondents shared Steve’s tragic love of Holden’s finest wedge-shaped sports mobile. Some of them simply wanted to point out (usually in very colourful language) just what a blight the Piazza was on the Australian motoring


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landscape. Gary from Wollongong offered his thoughts: ‘I can tell you what happened to the Piazza: it was a dud and no one bought it. There you go, I’ve just saved you a whole lot of time and money.’ But either way all this talk of our search had generated extra torque at the rear wheels and Joe and I were ready to burn some rubber on Australia’s roads, or at least the wellsealed, straight ones. After packing Alyce with my essentials and a large quantity of non-essentials, I said goodbye to the ailing family dog, hooked up the Discman to the Piazza’s original Clarion sevenband graphic equaliser stereo radio cassette and headed off to pick up co-driver Joe and his possessions, making fleeting note of the small itch I felt at the top of my left foot . . . ‘Petrol to hit record prices’. That was the headline that glared at us from the Mercury, Hobart’s trusted news source. I had $287 in my bank account and enough cash in my wallet for a few beers and a quick play on the pokies on the ferry across to Melbourne, so naturally I was stoked that the price of petrol, likely to be our biggest expense on the trip, was going through the roof. That said, however, I was confident of the fact that everyone knows Tasmania has the most expensive petrol in the country and that it would be way cheaper interstate. In fact I was counting on this because, despite knowing that I would have no income for the next few months, I hadn’t really considered the fact that things like food, accommodation and of course petrol were going to cost money, and as such hadn’t bothered to save. Like Chris, I had spent the previous few days stuffing the essentials into a bag and asking myself the important questions,


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xxxiv In Search of the Holden Piazza like: Isn’t my tent supposed to have poles? Where is my other thong? And, how many jumpers, undies and Prince CDs am I going to need? The big morning everything felt different, I don’t know why. Perhaps because I was up at five eager to take on a new day (I usually don’t surface until well after eight). In any case, that day had ‘big day’ written all over it. There was a heap of stuff to do, and as I’m not the most organised of people this included dropping various stuff around at various mates’ places. Fortunately pretty much everything I needed for a trip around Australia was already in the back of Murray, my 1992 Mazda 626 (the six cylinder, not the girly little four)—it’s amazing the things you find under all those spare jackets, sports shoes and remains of too many takeaway meals. So all I needed to do was say a few last-minute goodbyes, transfer my worldly goods from one boot to another, and I was ready to begin our quest. By the time we had finished packing Joe’s gear and attaching the fluffy dice to the rear vision mirror, we couldn’t help but notice just how chockers Alyce was, even with the back seats folded down. What we didn’t know at the time was that this would turn out to be quite fortuitous, as the extra weight over the back tyres negated the shopping-trolleylike handling that the original weight distribution caused. Who knows, maybe it was the extra seven-pack of Rio undies I bought at the last minute that saved our lives on the odd occasion when Alyce threatened to slide sideways on the dodgy retreads we’d shod her with. Such was the lack of room behind the front seats, we were forced to lament that the only way we were going to be able to pick up sexy hitchhiking Swedish backpackers


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was by one of us being left at the side of the road. Having agreed to take it in turns to be left by the side of the road, we slipped into the contoured, once-plush velour seats and buckled up—finally we were ready to go in search of the Holden Piazza.


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‘Piazza is a penthouse of pleasure and performance.’

‘Piazza is a penthouse of pleasure and performance.’

While we were ready to go in search of the Holden Piazza, our Holden Piazza wasn’t. Cruising north along the highway 14 kilometres out of Hobart, still 272 kilometres short of the Bass Strait ferry terminal, Alyce began to sound like a helicopter, a helicopter that was getting closer by the second. It was as if 1980s super-chopper Airwolf had risen from its secret hangar and was rapidly approaching us from behind. Joe and I looked at each other in disbelief. We couldn’t fathom that the journey that had been years in the making was about to stall so close to home. We pulled off the highway and began the lengthy task of diagnosing Alyce’s problem. This was made all the more difficult by the fact that neither 1


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2 In Search of the Holden Piazza

Joe nor I can tell the difference between a differential and a mud flap. So full credit to us when we altered our initial diagnosis from serious engine failure to a muffler problem. Then we further revised our diagnosis to a rear tyre problem . . . that is after we actually got out of the car. It seemed that in our quest to save money we perhaps shouldn’t have opted for retread tyres. Seems said tread had begun to fall off said tyre. We later learnt that tyres have speed ratings. A speed rating is the speed that a tyre can withstand without flying apart. Apparently, genuine sports cars like the Piazza need decent tyres with a higher speed rating if you are going to drive them on the highway. The relief and happiness we felt knowing it was only a rogue tyre that had temporarily stopped us in our tracks soon dissipated when we realised we would have to pull pretty much everything we packed out of the car to reach the spare. We immediately discovered one of the items we had neglected to bring . . . a tyre wrench that actually fitted the nuts on the wheels. We had made a point of making sure there was a jack and tools in the boot of the car early in our preparation, because after all, what sort of morons would set off on a 20 000-kilometre journey without a few essentials like that? Little tip for new players: just because you buy a car with a jack and tools in the boot, never assume that they are actually going to fit. Chris and I set about attempting to rectify our latest setback in a calm and rational manner. After storming around our now empty vehicle, swearing profusely and lamenting ‘the worst f*cking idea you’ve ever had Warr’, I remembered my girlfriend’s parents had furnished us with a fairly comprehensive tool kit.


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‘Piazza is a penthouse of pleasure and performance.’ 3 I’d always thought that Danni’s parents liked me, but thankfully it seemed they liked me enough to donate enough equipment to ensure that I would make it back in one piece. Then again, maybe they were hoping that having enough tools would help take me far, far away from their daughter . . . We found a socket that fitted the wheel nuts perfectly (who says I’m not handy with a wrench?), removed the mangled rubber, fitted our spare dodgy retread, and were soon back on the road singing along to the Beatles classic ‘Back in the USSR’, the lyrics to which Joe had thoughtfully rearranged to have us sing ‘Back in the Piazza’. With such lyrical chops I just can’t understand why our band never made it. With our minor setback successfully dealt with, we travelled up the Midlands Highway, the main arterial linking Tasmania’s major population centres, contemplating just what the next couple of months might hold. No one honked their horns at us despite the plea by local ABC radio to farewell us by doing so, unless the honk we got coming into Devonport wasn’t actually for cutting in front of a car at the last minute as we navigated our way towards the ferry. With a bit of time up our sleeves before we had to board the Spirit of Tasmania we headed to the local Irish-themed pub for a couple of beers. It was while debating the acting merits of the various female ‘Home and Away’ stars we’d seen on the pub’s TV that Joe received an eerie phone call from a friend. ‘Did the guy who designed your car do the Delorean?’ my mate Aaron asked when I answered the phone.


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4 In Search of the Holden Piazza ‘Yes he did,’ I replied. I was about to reel off some of Giorgetto Giugiaro’s more famous designs but Aaron interrupted. ‘Well he’s dead,’ Aaron said, explaining that he had just heard on the radio that the designer of the DMC Delorean (of Back to the Future fame) had passed away over night. I relayed this information to Chris. We looked at each other for a stunned moment, then couldn’t stop laughing. No disrespect to Mr Giugiaro’s family, but what were the chances of the great designer dying on the day that we started our quest in honour of his most misunderstood vehicle. Still, this might explain why I hadn’t received a response to my letter asking him how he thought his design had faired after it was handed over to Isuzu for manufacture—we’re guessing it was akin to how Joern Utzon felt when he left the uncompleted Sydney Opera House. Chris and I then decided we would have a drink in Giugiaro’s honour that night at one or all of the ship’s three bars. As we crossed the glassy seas of Bass Strait, this is exactly what we did, long into the night . . . The benefit of arriving by ferry in the heart of Melbourne is negated by arriving so bloody early in morning, especially if you’ve had a few beers the night before. Chris and I had been saying to each other for weeks that we would ‘get organised’ once we got to Melbourne. Now that we had arrived in Melbourne we weren’t sure what getting organised actually meant so we decided instead to head for our favourite breakfast eatery, Greasy Joe’s in St Kilda, to fuel up before tackling the day ahead. As we downed our respective fry-ups, a scan of the morning paper revealed that our hangovers were ill-earned; Giorgetto Giugiaro was still alive and kicking, it was John Delorean who had passed away (hmmm, maybe there’s another book in that one).


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‘Piazza is a penthouse of pleasure and performance.’ 5 However, on the plus side of our hangovers—if there is such a thing—we happened upon an unregistered Piazza in a supermarket car park. We’d only been in Melbourne for a couple of hours and already we’d managed to find a Piazza just metres from our breakfast pit stop. We hoped that the slightly dilapidated silver jalopy we’d stumbled upon wasn’t going to be the finest example we’d encounter. Although nothing special in terms of an auto, Chris and I still excitedly snapped away, hoping to capture our find from all angles. I’m sure a few passers-by found our behaviour a little odd, but as far as we know nobody reported us to the terrorism hotline. Apparently it takes more than two seedylooking blokes and a bomb to arouse suspicion these days. Stumbling upon this Piazza completely by accident made us figure that this quest was going to be a piece of cake. Next stop, Holden head office at Fishermans Bend. We’d like to tell you that it was our tough negotiating skills that got us access to the big wigs of Australian motoring, but truth be told our mate Scott—at whose flat we were staying—is a Holden employee and keen supporter of the Piazza Search (you’d have to be to put up with us taking up most of your lounge room floor for numerous nights). Somehow, he organised a meeting for us with such Holden luminaries as Ross McKenzie, Executive Director of Sales and Marketing; Ed Jaworski, Financial Controller; Neil Pogfon, Vehicle Planning Manager; and Rod Alford, Sales Promotions Manager, and more importantly a multiple Piazza owner himself. These days these blokes were all high up in the corporate structure, but they were all involved in the introduction of


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the Piazza to Australia nearly 20 years earlier. And, for some unknown reason, they had agreed to the discuss the impact of the Piazza’s introduction to the Australian motoring market with two guys who had their hearts set on seeking out and recording as many examples as possible of a car that had gone down in motoring history as one of their company’s greatest sales failures. Oddly though, not one of them could actually remember much about the Piazza. Seems there were bigger problems at Holden in the mid-80s than one overpriced sports coupe which had sunk like a lead balloon. Seems to be a case of ‘if you remember the Piazza in the 80s then you weren’t there’. Without knowing too much about what was happening behind the scenes at Holden 20 years ago, at a guess I’d have one word for you: Camira. Seriously. Whoever would have thought that one was going to fly? The general consensus though was that most likely it was the prohibitively high price tag which nobbled sales in Australia. They did concede, however, that perhaps Holden dragged their feet a little when it came to importing the Piazza. After all, Isuzu commenced manufacturing and selling the car in Japan as early as 1981. By the time the Piazza reached the Holden stables in 1986, the horsepowers had bolted—the floating of the Australian dollar saw the Japanese yen strengthen considerably against the local currency, pushing up the price of imported cars, and rivals in the same class had begun producing better and cheaper cars such as Toyota’s impressive Celica.


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‘Piazza is a penthouse of pleasure and performance.’ 7

Holden also believe the Piazza received harsh treatment from the Australian motoring press, especially in terms of its handling. Reviews of the day included observations such as the belittling, ‘Piazza—an overpriced understatement’. The direct, ‘almost whichever way one looks at it, the Piazza is a disappointment’. The more direct ‘ . . . the Piazza is such a disappointment, and at such a price!’, and the even more direct ‘ . . . it is not the exciting car we had hoped it would be’. And the melancholy, ‘unrequited expectations often leave the heart heavy’. When it came to handling, the critics were particularly harsh, saying ‘The Piazza is a real handful in performance driving: bump steer, roll oversteer, understeer and alarming nosedive under brakes—it’s all there.’ In summary, ‘On good roads and in capable hands the car will thrill a lot of people; on bad roads and in inexperienced hands, this same Piazza will frighten a lot more people.’ We left the meeting with the feeling that we hadn’t really enhanced their respective days, but were grateful for the opportunity to pose a few hard-hitting questions and to receive a semi-official response from Holden to our quest. Next up the Piazza Search juggernaut threw us our second phone interview with Peter Hellier and Judith Lucy on their nationally syndicated afternoon radio show on Fox FM. I tried to convince Joe that we had now reached minor minor minor celebrity status and that I was prepared to make the leap to the next level of minor minor celebrity status. He was, however, hesitant to assign any such status just yet, instead preferring to wait for the ultimate minor-celebrity litmus test—a spot on breakfast television. I was hanging out


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for ‘Good Morning Australia’ although I know Joe has a bit of a soft spot for Mel on the ‘Sunrise’ program. With our media commitments out of the way, we were free to attend to some of the more pertinent issues associated with tracking down Piazzas, like finding the little buggers. The first call we made was to a bloke named Nick. It turned out he had a silver Piazza parked in a supermarket car park in St Kilda. Bingo. It was the one we had seen at breakfast. Spooky huh? Nick was a former Tasmanian living in Melbourne who had purchased his car a few months earlier. He had it shipped down from Queensland and was keen to get it back on the road. We didn’t have the heart to tell Nick that he might be up for a few quid. You see, Nick’s Piazza was a heap of crap. It was unregistered, a little rusty and generally looking every single day of its near 20 years. Which is not meant in anyway to offend, Nick. Some of the cars on our journey would for one reason or another prove to be pretty extraordinary vehicles; the vast majority, however, were dead standard Piazzas. Or just dead. Nick’s car was an example of the latter. While Nick was actually unable to get his silver rocket started on the day we arrived to inspect it, he assured us that having taken it for the odd sly spin around the back blocks of St Kilda, it did have plenty of go. For a young fella, we guessed about 23 or 24, Nick had certainly owned his fair share of vehicles. Nick described himself as mechanically capable rather than a full-on rev head, but Chris and I had our doubts as he listed the cars he’d previously worked on and how he’d modified ‘fairly quick’ production vehicles—including Celicas and V8 utes—into


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‘Piazza is a penthouse of pleasure and performance.’ 9 monsters powered by high octane fuel and testosterone. So why a Piazza we asked? Nick explained that he was initially after a little runabout to take him and his mates to the beach, but when he found out that these little babies were just about un-driveable from the moment they rolled off the production line, he knew he had to get one. He then proceeded to grab the full workshop manual and electronics schematics from inside his Piazza and relayed to us the areas that he was going to soup up a little. But while he was flicking through the 500-odd-page manual, reality must have set in for Nick because by the time we got back to Melbourne a few long months later, he’d sold the car to someone a bit more committed to the cause. Although it’s clear he was not a true connoisseur, we were truly grateful to Nick for introducing us to our first Piazza of the trip. One down, who knows how many to go.


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‘Piazza. Even its Italian name quickens your pulse.’

‘Piazza. Even its Italian name quickens your pulse.’

The next day marked probably the most momentous occasion of our search, nay our lives. We got up early, pressed the only collared shirts we had packed, and headed for the leafy Melbourne suburb of Glen Waverly. It was an occasion befitting ironing, after all one has to make a good impression when hob-knobbing with quiz show royalty. Yup, we were off to meet the man who inspired our quest way back in 1986, the one and only Cary Young. When Joe and I first decided to undertake the important task of locating the remaining Piazzas in Australia, we knew it would be remiss of us not to at least try to meet the great man. In light of this, I carefully drafted an email to the quiz 10


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master in the hope of firstly being able to articulate to him what the hell Joe and I were actually doing and secondly trying to get him to provide a response. As the weeks and months went by my greatest fears began to seem realised—after all what sensible, (highly) intelligent bloke heading towards retirement would want to meet two idiots claiming to be living out a drunken whim and probably just taking the piss anyway? Then, returning to my desk one afternoon from a particularly dreary meeting, I habitually checked my email in the hope that someone had sent me something other than work to help pass my day. Low and behold, there in my inbox, was a message from the great man himself. I was so overwhelmed I had to remind myself that it was probably just a polite ‘sorry not interested’. Instead, it was a long email apologising for not getting back to me sooner. Turns out Cary had been holidaying in Central America. Probably one of a long list of holidays he had won on ‘Sale’ but had yet to take. His email also confirmed that not only had he indeed won a Piazza on ‘Sale’ but he still had it! Cary went on to say that he would be more than happy to catch up for a chat about his car and his time on the ‘world’s richest quiz’. I felt like we had just won the major prize, cash jackpot and got to snog ‘Sparky’ Platt all in one! We encountered a little difficulty on our trip to Glen Waverly. Rather than sour relations with my co-driver at this early stage of the trip, I politely asked if he was aware that north always lies at the top of maps. C’mon, hands up who else knew that?


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12 In Search of the Holden Piazza Turns out I was able to teach Chris something that day, so that was nice. When Alyce, Chris and I pulled up at the specified address, Cary immediately strode out to meet us. We both sat transfixed. Not because we were star struck (which we were), or because Cary’s very presence made us feel awed (which it did), but because of the enormous band of gold wrapped around his wrist. ‘Had to have won it on “Sale” was the thought that immediately lodged in both our minds.’ Turns out we were correct. Cary’s ludicrously expensive watch had been a prize, and in its day it had the distinction of having the thinnest face of any watch ever made. Cary, however, wore it not because it was a flashy, world-record-setting timepiece, but because it had kept perfect time for the last 20-odd years. The other initial impression we had of the great man was that this intellectual giant was actually quite diminutive, something that his head-shot in the Herald Sun could not convey. Like everyone on television, Cary is considerably shorter in real life than he appears on the screen. Not that I was going to mention this to him. After all, I’m a little on the vertically challenged side myself and, mores the point, Cary was quite a promising boxer back in his pre-‘Sale’ prime (narrowly missing out on Commonwealth Games selection, something his brother subsequently achieved). Cary and Lyn Young turned out to be two of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. Cary was happy to share stories of his time on ‘Sale’ and his early life in New Zealand, and to walk us through his corridor of ‘Sale Memorabilia’—a homage to Cary’s many appearances on the show. Shots of Cary with Tony and Alyce, Glen and Nikki, his ‘Sale Ashes Series’ team


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‘Piazza. Even its Italian name quickens your pulse.’ 13 mates, and the spoils of victory adorned the hallway of his house. But the great man was humble too. When we asked him why he was so good at quizzes, he replied modestly ‘I’ve got a pretty good memory’. Somehow we got talking about my own New Zealand heritage and how my mother had tried to tell me that my grandmother’s cousin Charlie Saxton was once a representative of the Kiwi’s All Blacks rugby union side. I had always been doubtful as no one I had ever spoken to had heard of him. When I mentioned this to Cary, he raced out to another room and returned with a book about the history of the All Blacks and revealed that Charlie Saxton had not only represented New Zealand he had also captained the side once on a tour to England. A ‘pretty good memory’ indeed. (And sorry for doubting you Mum.) In addition to his impressive watch, from where he was sitting Cary was able to point out many of the prizes he had won on ‘Sale’. The couches, the video player, the television, the dining setting, the diamond-studded key rings, the garden hose. At lunch there was the Stanley Rogers cutlery set, the outdoor setting, and the plates and glassware. Luckily for us—and not surprisingly really—Cary also has a penchant for trivial things, and you probably can’t get much more trivial than two blokes travelling around the country looking for dodgy Holdens. But before the prizes and before the Piazza, Cary was born in to a working class family in New Zealand. Young Cary was an avid reader of books at school. He couldn’t afford to attend university so started his working life in the public service, as a customs officer. Before long he got the


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travel itch and headed to the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States before eventually returning home to New Zealand, but his hunger to travel more led him to Australia and to the mining town of Mt Isa in north Queensland. It was there that he met his wife, Lyn, who was working in the local pharmacy. Cary and Lyn moved to Charters Towers when Cary got a job at the local abattoir. It was around this time he saw a new quiz show on television. After watching a few episodes of ‘Sale’ he mentioned to Lyn that he thought he would have a pretty good shot at it. With some encouragement from his loving wife, Cary wrote to the program’s producer, Grundy’s in Melbourne, and was informed that they would soon be auditioning in Brisbane. This was a problem for Cary: not only was there the expense of getting down to Brisbane from Charters Towers, there were also three days in lost wages to consider. He discussed it with Lyn and they agreed that he didn’t want to regret not going to the audition. Not long after, in December 1981, Cary became one of the show’s first champions, winning a BMW and prizes totalling $70 000. It was during the taping of this show that host Tony Barber asked Cary if he would be interested in coming back for a special Champion of Champions series. For financial reasons Cary sold the BMW but with Tony’s offer in mind he began taking his trivia a bit more seriously. Cary is well remembered for his countless victories over the next decade or so. There were the Champion of Champions, Commonwealth Games, the Ashes and International series. Joe mentioned to Cary that many people today still recall his ‘Sale’ nickname, ‘The Butcher from Charters Towers’; Tony


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Barber used to make an issue of underlining the fact that boxing, butchers and quiz shows don’t usually go together. It’s true Cary worked in a meat works but, for the record, he wasn’t actually a butcher, he worked more in the administrative side of things. To Cary’s mind he was a quiz show participant working in a meat works rather than a meat worker participating in a quiz show. No argument from us. After a delicious lunch put on by Lyn, we went out to have a look at the car. Cary’s Piazza was in much better condition than Nick’s, or ours. Apart from regular servicing, the car, an automatic, was completely standard and looked as good as it did nearly 20 years ago. Like Alyce, Cary’s Piazza was red. Unlike Alyce, Cary’s Piazza retained its lustre, had an immaculate interior and a fully functioning digital instrument display. Cary’s friends still wonder why he has kept the car all these years. They frequently ask why he hasn’t sold it for something a little more practical. Simple response, really: he likes it, it has never caused him any trouble—and it was free after all. Cary, Lyn, Chris and I ran around our two cars snapping away with our cameras like tourists at an unfeasibly large fruit-shaped landmark until the time came for us to push on and continue the quest. We presented Cary and Lyn with a bottle of fine Tassie Pinot and he in turn presented us with a faithful re-creation of a photo taken the day the Youngs took delivery of their Piazza. The photo Cary handed us was exactly the same as one adorning his hallway wall, right down to the Seinfeld-style jeans-andrunners combo, with the only difference being a bit of a grey tinge to the trademark beard. It’s great work on Cary’s part that he can still fit into the outfits he wore 20 years ago, although


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16 In Search of the Holden Piazza as any Piazza owner will tell you, there’s not a lot of room up front, so it pays to stay trim. In the lead-up to the trip, we did try to get in touch with the other stars of ‘Sale’, Tony Barber and Alyce ‘Sparky’ Platt. A bit of research uncovered an email address for Tony so a polite request was made for a bit of his time. But it seems that Tony can spot a hair-brained scheme from a mile off, as his equally polite response wished us luck and provided a quick anecdote regarding Cary’s amazing quiz abilities, but rejected our offer to catch up over a cuppa and a Gingernut. Now that the ‘Piazza Search’ had taken on such epic proportions, we were betting Tony was regretting his decision to ditch us in favour of the ‘Dickwick’ commercials. The effervescent, talented and stunning ‘Sparky’ managed to elude us completely. I’d been dreaming of Alyce Platt sprawled across the bonnet of a red Piazza for nigh on 20 years. But now that I had what seemed like a legitimate excuse to bring those dreams to light, the ‘goddess from the gift shop’ was nowhere to be found. Probably for the best really. Armed with the morning’s revelation that Chris is utterly clueless with maps, I suggested we swap positions in the command module (i.e. the front of the car) for the next leg—to Melbourne’s northern suburbs to meet Aiden and his machine. Aiden is the proud owner of a very sexy black Piazza, with what looks like a hell of a lot of work under the bonnet. I could detail exactly what modifications had been carried out, but my in-depth explanation of cams, compression ratios, exhausts and the like might get a little technical and I don’t want to lose anyone along the way. Its okay Joe, I think we’re all keeping up so far.


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‘Piazza. Even its Italian name quickens your pulse.’ 17 Suffice to say, if you lined up Alyce and the Piazzas we’d seen thus far for a quarter-mile race, Aiden’s would destroy us all. Aiden took us for a quick spin around the block and as we exited the vehicle a few stomach-churning minutes later, we were left in no doubt. We had a benchmark by which all future Piazzas would be judged. A unique feature of Aiden’s Piazza was a couple of matching dings in the otherwise flawless bonnet. When I mentioned these to our newest friend, his demeanour turned somewhat sour as he recalled the advent of these modifications. Apparently, when Aiden sought to modify the Piazza’s engine, he was turned down by a number of mechanics who refused to work on the notoriously temperamental little coupe. So when Aiden finally found a mechanic who not only agreed to work on it but jumped at the chance, Aiden thought his problems were over. A few weeks later he went to pick up his pride and joy. All was well and Aiden was very happy with his newly modified engine, until the mechanic enthusiastically slammed the bonnet down, only to find that the newly tweaked air intake was in fact too large and had made a small ding when the bonnet was closed. When I asked about the second ding, Aiden rather curtly replied that, after fixing this initial problem, the mechanic had left a wrench sitting on the engine block when he closed the bonnet again. Since then Aiden has done most of the work on the car himself. Following the small tyre-shredding incident on the first day of our quest, we decided it might be prudent to not only replace the mutilated tyre but perhaps also to get rid of the other cheap re-treads we had procured for the journey. Armed with our new found media profile we attacked the Yellow Pages, confident of finding commercially minded retailers


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who, we were sure, would want to literally throw free tyres at us. We hit the streets with a long list of potential tyre suitors and Scotty’s long-since-updated 1991 edition of Melways, the bible of the Melbourne road network. While we were extremely grateful for the Melways, it was an interesting experience using the 1991 edition in 2005 conditions. It seems Premier Kennett really did make some progress on reforming the Victorian capital’s road infrastructure throughout the 1990s. We eventually found our first tyre target in Port Melbourne. The good folk working there were pleasant enough, but didn’t hide the fact that they weren’t going to be pleasant enough to help us out. Next we hit a tyre place in Elwood, where we waited around for the bloke responsible for saying no to sponsorship deals for guys who were driving around the country on the back of a drunken conversation. We headed back to Port Melbourne and attempted to butter up a third. By this time Joe and I were taking it in turns to try and win over the retailers, expertly reeling off a spiel detailing how much was in it for us and how little for them. It was my turn to pitch and fail. Now that we were confident that we were no longer confident we decided, out of interest, to find out how much a couple of new tyres for Alyce might cost us. ‘A Holden what?’ ‘Piazza’ ‘Nup, got a Holden Rodeo, Holden Scurry, Honda Prelude but no Piazza,’ said the manager, looking down at what he claimed was the encyclopaedia of cars and their matching tyre sizes.


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‘Try an Isuzu Piazza, or an Isuzu Impulse,’ I said, sounding somewhat like an expert in badge engineering. ‘Nup, haven’t got anything for those either I’m afraid. What size are they?’ ‘Er, not sure . . . round black rubber size?’ I replied as Joe ran out the door and round the block to where Alyce was parked to ascertain the size of her tread. He came back with the seemingly appropriate answer of 195/60 R1485. ‘Nup, haven’t got any of them’ was the seemingly inappropriate answer from the manager. ‘But I could get some in for you by the end of next week if you want me to order them?’ We thanked him for his time but declined, as we had a schedule to stick to—we were soon to leave for Adelaide and didn’t feel that we could afford to wait around for a couple of full-price tyres. With our flagging self-belief we headed to tyre retailer number four just up the road, where we met Manager Martin. Manager Martin was one of those extremely busy-looking people who conduct deals on the go, walking around with a mobile phone headset firing off quick sentences and demanding fast answers. When he was ready to see us, we felt compelled to give our pitch with similar haste. Martin um-ed and ah-ed, but you could almost see his mind ticking over trying to find a palatable deal for both parties. Eventually he fitted two new tyres at a price that was somewhat cheaper than the cost of the retreads they were replacing. But wait, there was more. Not only did we get a good discount, we got two key rings, two pens, four stickers and two t-shirts!


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We loaded our multiples-of-two booty into Alyce and drove off, hopeful that our tyre troubles were behind us. The next day we departed Scott’s Port Melbourne abode and embarked on the 4-minute drive to our new accommodation, a one-bedroom apartment in East St Kilda. The apartment’s residents—Tom and Kate—were away for a few days, leaving us with a central base from which to seek out Piazzas. But before we left, the least we could do was give Scott a turn behind the wheel of Alyce. Joe and I were both of the belief that Scott was amongst the best drivers we knew, and the way he sped and cajoled Alyce through the back streets of Port Melbourne gave us no reason to believe otherwise. In fact, the man who has driven countless cars for testing and research purposes thought that Alyce’s capabilities weren’t a complete disgrace. ‘It actually handles a lot better than I thought it would, it’s actually not a bad little car . . . considering . . .’ Scott said as he completed his drive. That afternoon we headed to Boronia, an outer suburb of Melbourne set at the foot of the Dandenong Ranges. Here we met the laconic Leon, and his blue/purple Piazza. When Leon greeted us in his tracky dacks and t-shirt, accompanied by a similarly dressed young girl, it was pretty apparent we’d found another laid-back Piazza owner—although Leon had plans to get his stationary machine back on the road, he seemed to have resigned himself to the fact it wasn’t going to happen any time soon. Still, Leon seemed a nice bloke, and was honest in his assessment that he couldn’t afford to spend much on his car, what with house and family obligations. The other factor


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which precluded his car from going anywhere in a hurry was that his brother had pilfered some parts, including hoses and a battery, for his own car and had lost the key. Even if all the requisite bits had been under the bonnet where they were supposed to be, not only would Leon have been unable to start it without exposing some criminal tendencies, but without a key he was unable to even get into his beast. His wife really liked the car though, and had indicated that she would be happy for it to be her daily runabout, should it ever actually run. Apparently, though, having an immobile Piazza in the front yard was garnering Leon some respect among the local hoons, who would often stop and stare at the unique beast. But actually driving it was just a daydream as Leon couriered his young family around the place in their trusty old Tarago. We left Boronia with the feeling we had found yet another Piazza that wouldn’t be back on Australian roads anytime soon. Still, a Piazza with few short-term prospects of plying the roads was still a Piazza in our books, which made Leon’s car number six (and possibly a source of spare parts should anything go wrong with Alyce while we were in the area). The next morning I noticed that the top of my left foot had become a little bit red from where I had been rubbing it in order to relieve the itch I’d had since leaving Tassie. I also noted another red mark had appeared, this time on my right foot. Anyway, enough of my podiatry woes. Joe and I jumped in Alyce and headed over the West Gate Bridge to Werribee, about a 30-minute drive west from Melbourne. Here we met Malcolm, the proud owner of a black Piazza which was indeed a Piazza worth being proud


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of. When we arrived, Malcolm, a slightly built, gently spoken young bloke, was busy polishing the bonnet in readiness for our visit. He had bought his car from his uncle, who had spent many thousands of dollars modifying the car’s engine, exhaust, handling and interior instrumentation. Malcolm started running through the list of ‘mods’ (that’s ‘modifications’ for you lay folk) which he and his uncle had undertaken. The extra grunt of this Piazza was pretty evident when Malcolm moved the car forward a little to get better light for the photos. A gentle tap on the accelerator had the rear wheels spinning ferociously. While it was only the seventh Piazza we had seen, we were sure that Malcolm’s would end up being amongst, if not, the best. Malcolm also detailed his plans for the future: another spray job, full black-leather interior and a spot in Autosalon 2006. Mal admitted that every cent he earned went into his car, noting that this was an easy thing to do without a girlfriend. Although Malcolm lost us a little with the techo aspects of his car, even the untrained idiot (Joe and I have had no training in the field of idiocy, believe it or not, it comes pretty naturally to us) could see it was a special piece of work. The standard chequerboard rims had been replaced with shiny, 17-inch five-spoke mags, the front grille had been removed and a shiny ventilated plate sat in its place, and the tinted windows were covered in racing team decals. Even though Mal’s Piazza wasn’t actually stock standard, it at least looked like the sort of vehicle that would leave your standard four-cylinder in its dust as it took off from the traffic lights. Unfortunately for Malcolm he was unable to


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take advantage of the sheer power of his car, courtesy of a hefty loss of demerit points as a result of his other love of the two-wheeled variety of vehicle. Following the rundown on Malcolm’s car, he turned to us, gestured towards Alyce and asked, ‘What sort of plans do you have for this baby?’ Joe and I looked blankly at each other before Joe gave his considered response. ‘Well, Malcolm, we’re keeping her pretty standard so she makes it around the country. We’ve cranked the boost up a little and installed a blow-off valve but that’s as far as we’re taking it.’ I was quite impressed. Joe managed to give the impression that we weren’t hopeless jokes who knew nothing about our car. And Malcolm didn’t have to know that the boost and the valve had been done by the previous owner and had we wanted to revert Alyce back to her standard specs we wouldn’t have had the first clue where to start. We headed back towards Melbourne via Altona to meet Rob. Rob resided at the end of a street that butted up to railway tracks, in an area that can really only be described as industrial. Rob’s place was a weatherboard house and it was hard to tell if the owner was in the process of demolishing or renovating it. Still, Rob was happy with the cheap rent and the space afforded by the front and rear yards. Rob had bought two black Piazzas for $900 from a wrecker, a bargain in anyone’s money. One car, which sat out the back, was not too far away from being back on the road, while the other, sitting out the front, had been scavenged for parts. Neither of Rob’s Piazzas stacked up against Malcolm’s show piece, but nonetheless it soon became apparent that Rob was


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24 In Search of the Holden Piazza going to be one of our favourite Piazza owners. Rob is like a committed surgeon, taking on the cases that the others have left for dead, and his yard is filled with ailing vehicles saved from the crusher or simply in need of a bit of special attention. He had a total of nine cars in various states of repair: four Nissan Pulsars, two Piazzas, a Holden Shuttle, a Holden Rodeo and a Gemini filled the ward where Dr Rob performed his special blend of mechanical healing with a mangy, but friendly and wellbehaved, stray mutt playing the role of nurse. In order to get the best photo, it was decided that Rob’s two Piazzas should sit side by side in his front yard. Achieving this in a busy casualty ward such as Dr Rob’s was no mean feat. Clearing a path to the front yard involved moving a Pulsar so he could get to another Pulsar, to shift the Rodeo so he could reach the Piazza. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts to start the Piazza parked behind the shed, an epiphinous expression appeared on Rob’s face and he jumped out of the car and disappeared into his shed, appearing moments later with a battery. Sure enough, this helped immeasurably and the engine started purring gently. Suddenly Rob was out of the car again and silently slipped back into the shed. Chris and I glanced at each other and shrugged our shoulders, but all was revealed when Rob reappeared, this time toting a steering wheel. As we took photos of Rob’s two specimens, he explained to us the work he’d done on the various cars around his yard. The freight trains rumbled past and drowned out most of what he was saying, but that was okay because to be honest we couldn’t understand the technical stuff anyway.


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‘Piazza. Even its Italian name quickens your pulse.’ 25 Unlike the previous guys who had Piazzas sitting in their front yards (or supermarket car parks) with grand plans of getting them back on the road, Rob actually has the know-how—and the inclination—to do it. This is despite the horrendous run of luck the poor fella had been having. In the space of just a few months, Rob had dealt with serious health issues, a split from his girlfriend and a legal battle arising from him being shafted by an insurance company. Still, he remained remarkably upbeat and happy to meet a couple of fellow Piazza owners. We reluctantly left Rob to his afternoon bowl of Sultana Bran and hit the road, but not before making him promise to send us pictures of his car once he’d put on the new wheels that he’d specially bought for it. While we weren’t yet willing to admit it, perhaps Chris and I were actually getting caught up in the world of petrol, psi and power. While very little of what Rob said actually sank in, every now and then we picked up something that correlated with what Nick or Aiden had told us, and even the odd bit of handy advice that might help us keep our chariot in one piece for the remainder of our quest. With our work for the day done, Chris and I decided to take a break from our hectic schedule and catch up with buddies for beers. I dropped Chris off at the home of a former Taswegian mate while I headed off to see my ex-flatmate Sam, who was conveniently located just around the corner. Before going our separate ways Chris and I arranged a time to meet up so we could get back to our borrowed flat, grab a bite to eat and head off to the Telstra Dome that night to watch Chris’s mighty Kangaroos take on Carlton.


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26 In Search of the Holden Piazza Sam and I went down to his local to grab a few quiet ones. It turned out to be a bit of a Tassie reunion as former Hobart underworld figure, author, musician and all-round nut bag Mark Brandon ‘Chopper’ Read was there enjoying a quiet Saturday afternoon beverage. It’s always nice to see a familiar face. I went to pick up Chris in the late afternoon as arranged and, although we were running a little behind schedule, everything was still looking good to get to the footy for the opening bounce at 7.00 p.m. That is, until we strolled up the street to grab a tram and Chris took the tickets out of his pocket to have a look at where we were to be seated. One look at Chris’s face and I immediately knew something was horribly wrong. I snatched the tickets from his hand and, sure enough, there, printed in bold black type, was the kick-off time—2.10 p.m. I thought it was hilarious, but Chris took a little longer to see the funny side of it. He’d booked—and paid for—the tickets over the internet, and I was yet to pay him back for mine. No chance he was getting any money from me for a game that we didn’t get to see. Given that we had already indulged a little during the afternoon and were pretty drained from nights sleeping on cold, hard floors and being up at sparrow-fart due to the less than adequate curtains at Scotty’s place, we decided a few more beers and a quiet night in were the go. As we sat watching ‘Australia’s Funniest Home Videos’, or as I like to call it, ‘that show where they keep interrupting footage of Toni Pearen with pointless clips of kiddies hitting their dads in the knackers’, it was decided that I would be in charge of teeing up the footy for the next day. Geelong was playing the Tigers at the MCG, and while it was a shame that we’d missed the Kangaroos’ game, everyone knows the Cats are a far superior team.


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The next day was the first of what would become known as a PFD—or Piazza Free Day. We didn’t have any Piazza owners to visit or chase up to arrange a visit so we did what any self-respecting Aussie male would do on a weekend and headed to the home of Australian rules football, the Melbourne Cricket Ground. I was still a bit upset about missing the Roos’ game, especially as the team notched up a five-goal win, but had no one to blame but myself. To make things worse, to ensure I got my footy fix, I was forced to go to a Geelong game with Joe, a proud, passionate and very cocky Cats supporter. Hopefully the Cats would lose so I wouldn’t have to hear about how great his team is all night. We awoke the next day with sore heads and a bit fuzzy on details from the previous evening, having spent the afternoon watching the Cats trounce the Tigers before hitting the MCG Bar and Bistro. Turned out another article, highlighting the important work Joe and I were undertaking, had hit the presses, this time in the Herald Sun newspaper. This put a swift end to another planned PFD, with the article generating a few more Piazza leads to chase up. One saw us heading northwest that afternoon to Taylors Lake, but not before we had detoured via the leafy suburb of Prahran for an interview on community radio. Brett de Hoedt from the Hooterville show on 3WBC had heard about Piazza Search from one of our previous media appearances and thought his listeners might be interested in our story. Chris carried us quite nicely. For some reason my throat was a bit dry and my stomach a little off, and I managed to swallow my tongue every time I tried to open my mouth. I’m putting this down to stress, or maybe it was the dodgy chicken burgers at


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28 In Search of the Holden Piazza the footy. It certainly had nothing to do with a couple of celebratory beers after the massive Geelong victory the day before. It was a shame really because I have always relied on being the charismatic, quick-witted half of the duo. I’m certainly not going to get too far on my looks. Brett, part-time radio host and part-time publicist, got Joe’s hopes up by saying that breakfast television would lap up our intriguing little jaunt. As we made our way towards Taylors Lake, we discussed whether or not television would add ten pounds to our already burgeoning frames. Joe somehow managed to hijack the conversation with his unhealthy obsession with Mel Doyle. When I interrogated him on what it was about Mel that got him so hot under the collar, his answer was quite simple: ‘Anyone who looks that good at six o’clock in the morning must be an absolute stunner.’ His logic could not be faulted. At suburban Taylors Lake, not far from Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport, we met beanie-clad goatee-wearing Troy, owner of a heavily modified white Piazza. Troy’s Piazza had the ingenious optional extra of being able to start its engine with the touch of a button from his own lounge room. Handy on those cold mornings when heavily modified turbos need a significant amount of warming up. Troy, as seemed to be the case with most Piazza owners we’d come across thus far, was a top bloke. He was genuinely interested in what we were doing and more than happy to take Joe and I for a spin around the block to show just what his Piazza could do. He didn’t shy away from the fact that he had spent a rather large amount of money on it. Troy had parted with $6000 so a bloke could all but destroy his


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engine, then handed over another $7000 to a more qualified mechanic to rebuild it. Happily, the result was an extremely quick car. We also noticed that, as with all the other Piazzas we’d seen with significant work on the engine, Troy’s car also had the standard issue dings in the bonnet from where the mechanic had slammed it down in triumph (or more likely frustration). While Joe and I were suitably impressed with Troy’s offering, we couldn’t help but wonder why the hell he bothered with an ageing sports coupe when the other car in his garage was a latest model Holden Monaro. When we quizzed him on this, we were informed that they were both fun, but the Piazza was a ‘different kind of fun’. With the amount of horsepower Troy’s car was cranking out, it’s the sort of fun that base jumpers and crocodile wrestlers have when they’re staring death in the face. The things we Piazza owners do for fun . . . Troy also had the distinction of being the last Melburnian Piazza owner we’d see on this leg of the journey. While we still had a number of leads to chase up, we knew we couldn’t hang around any longer—this was a national search after all. We told our prospective targets we would be sure to catch up with them on our return in a couple of months’ time and hit the road.


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It was great to finally be moving again. After eight years in the public service, my longest holiday was a week-long skiing trip to New Zealand, so the feeling of hitting the highway for a more or less undetermined length of time was one of pure relief. That’s not to say that on our previous holidays Chris and I hadn’t had a great time. We survived an earthquake in New Zealand, massive heatwaves in South Australia and some crippling hangovers in various parts of the world, but this was finally a real adventure. There was a fair bit of traffic on the road as we cruised towards Geelong. We hadn’t really thought through the idea of heading on our way during the Easter break. On the multi-lane highways Alyce had no problems accounting for the station wagons full of snotty kids, but in the built-up areas we had no

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‘The driver’s seat alone is a miracle.’ 31 choice but to putt along at the same speed as the cars in front of us. Still, it was good to be cruising and following the road signs, rather than arguing over the maps in an outdated Melways. It was cloudy and a little cool when we reached Geelong but it mattered little, for the home of Joe’s Cats provided us with a bounty of Piazzas and, better still, they were all in the one place. Steve, a Piazza owner, and proprietor of Reidy’s Automotive, had kindly agreed to provide a meeting point for the Geelong contingent. Steve was a friendly sort of bloke, I guess late thirties, with a smile that was never far from his face. Steve’s white Piazza was in fairly average secondhand condition, but it was by no means a bomb. Unlike some of the others we’d come across, this Piazza was still in full running order. Unfortunately, it was just one of the many projects Steve had on the go, and way down his list of priorities behind the FJ Holden and original matching trailer which took pride of place in his foyer. As we chatted to Steve about his car, his business and of course his immaculate FJ, Chris, a young engineering student, pulled up in his silver bullet and shortly thereafter Ian, the middle-aged manager of a tools business, arrived in a fine red example. In these three cars and their owners we had a pretty diverse cross-section of the Piazza family. Steve, a lover of fine automobiles, had simply rescued his from the crusher because he believes the Piazza is a unique car. Young Chris, who spent his days designing and racing cars, was trying to squeeze as much horsepower as he could out of his car (although being a typical engineer he was concerned about the safety aspects of cranking the thing too hard for its own good). Ian did a fair bit of a driving during the week


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for his business in a practical, comfortable and yet deadboring vehicle, so wanted a ‘toy’ to thrash about on weekends. Again, Joe and I were overwhelmed by how accommodating everyone was. It was apparent that this was the first time these Piazza owners had had the chance to meet other enthusiasts and they were keen to swap stories of their cars’ pasts and futures. Steve spoke of the 2006 Holden Day in Geelong as being a great opportunity to let Holden aficionados know of the forgotten coupe. We lined up Alyce with the other Piazzas for a photo opportunity and the row of four made for an impressive sight. In formation it was also easy to spot a number of minor differences. Joe and I knew that some of our front end wasn’t standard, but we were quite puzzled with a few of the subtle differences between the others. When young Chris told us that he had heavily cannibalised a VL Commodore to get lights, badges and an intercooler, things started to make sense. Sadly, however, it wasn’t long before Joe and I had to hit the road again, but for the first time we realised the potential of connecting Piazza owners with each other, not only so they could yarn about their quirky vehicles, but also so they could swap hints and troubleshoot for answers to those technical mechanical-type questions that Joe and I were completely unable to answer. Back on the tarmac we headed along the Great Ocean Road with the CD player cranking in tribute to Crowded House drummer Paul Hester. Now I’ve always liked Crowded House in small doses, but I have to confess it doesn’t take long to get sick of them after listening to Chris murdering their innocent songs on guitar in his


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‘The driver’s seat alone is a miracle.’ 33 attempts to impress the ladies on a drunken Saturday night. (And it’s not always a winning tactic, by the way.) Having heard the news of Hessie’s untimely death though, I decided a bit of the Crowdies wouldn’t hurt, and besides there were many CDs in Chris’s collection that I was looking forward to a lot less. We had intended to stop at Lorne but were making good time, so we came to the consensus that we should press on further down the road to Apollo Bay. I was particularly thankful. It’s a lovely spot Lorne, and I’ve had some fun there in the past. Like the time I managed to seriously injure my back on the trampolines by the beach, and then seriously injure my liver on Bacardi Breezers (not sure why) and scotch and dry. I shuddered as we drove past the evil trampolines and slowly rubbed my sciatic thigh and lamented the brain cells that I’d killed and the troubles each had caused me over the years. I’m sure there would have been plenty of opportunities to punish my creaky old frame wherever we spent the night so the decision to bypass Lorne was probably of very little consequence. Once at Apollo Bay we checked into the first of many caravan parks during the trip. The park cabin we selected met the basic criteria we would look for in all our future accommodation, namely beds and a telly—so we could watch ‘Neighbours’ (for Chris) and ‘Home and Away’ (for me). By this stage, you may have realised a few things. Chris and I are both quite clueless when it comes to cars and somewhat disillusioned by the fact that our youth is gradually getting away from us, effectively ending the potential for careers as professional athletes or rock stars. Something else to take note of is that having come to the above realisation, we have more or less decided to live vicariously through the residents of Erinsborough


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34 In Search of the Holden Piazza and Summer Bay. To avoid boring those of you who consider television soaps to be inane garbage, and to avoid spoiling things for those of you who are forced to watch old episodes on regional networks, we’ll try to avoid discussing plot details, but bear in mind that TV is a pretty important part of who we are, and therefore a substantial amount of important Piazza work was done whilst camped in front of ‘the box’. Over the years I’ve tended to spend a bit more on holiday accommodation than we would be spending on this trip, but consistency is the key, and every time we checked into a caravan park we could be pretty sure of what we’d be getting—one queensize bed, and at least two bunks, usually with thin, sticky, brownie/yellow vinyl mattresses (in a strange system, it turned out that whoever paid for the night’s lodgings got relegated to the dodgy bunks), an airconditioner, a fridge, a telly and a couch. Early on in our journey we’d fork out the extra $10 to $15 for our own bathroom and toilet, but as we had to tighten the purse strings those facilities were no longer regarded as essential. Along the way we would find that some of our cabins had a couple of extra niceties that the standard versions didn’t. For example, our good friends at Big 4 Port Augusta had free satellite telly; a couple of places actually had couches that faced the TV, which was handy; and some even came with their very own rotting corpse smell (more of that later). After some discussion regarding what we should do for food, we grabbed a reasonable sort of BBQ chook pizza and a few beers and settled in. I thought I’d be a nice guy and let Chris have his barbecue chicken because he started whining like a neglected puppy when I suggested a Margherita sauce might be the way to go. As with a lot of things, when it comes to pizzas


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‘The driver’s seat alone is a miracle.’ 35 I’m a bit of a traditionalist and don’t see the need for any fancypants sauces other than good old tomato. That said, Chris is known to get grumpy when food is concerned so I didn’t see any value in upsetting him this early into our mission. I’m grumpy after reading that. After the best night’s sleep we’d had in quite a while, Chris and I got up and launched into what was going to be a fairly regular routine for the next couple of months. This involved dragging ourselves out of bed at 9.00 a.m., then one of us cleaned up while the other had a shower. Then we swapped, with the freshly showered one packing the car and carrying out routine maintenance. In case this gives you the impression that we actually knew what we were doing under the bonnet, routine maintenance basically consisted of checking the oil and water and then replacing the bit of gaffer tape that was proving a worthy substitute for the missing catch on the passenger’s side of the bonnet. As well as being highly functional, the tape gave the impression that we’d made running repairs, V8-supercar style, and hopefully provided us with an air of credibility that would, of course, vanish as soon as we opened our mouths. The day provided us with the best weather we’d had so far, a cloudless sky and the temperature pushing 30 degrees. Perfect for wearing thongs, even if it did aggravate the skin on the top of my feet. Actually, I was becoming a little worried about them now; I didn’t want a prolonged skin complaint while on holidays and the small, itchy patches on my foot had spread a little. Still, they weren’t too bad and I figured that letting them breathe might help the situation. With Even’s ‘Sunshine Comes’ blaring we continued our way down the Great Ocean Road towards Adelaide, taking


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in the naturally weathered and wave-blasted sandstone columns known as the Twelve Apostles. In actual fact there were only ever eight Apostles and since our return another has toppled. I hope we weren’t in anyway responsible for its demise, perhaps weakened as Joe sped, wheels-a-screeching, from the car park. With the requisite holiday snaps out of the way, we made our next stop at Port Campbell. This was the second time in five years that Joe and I had been to Port Campbell. It was also the second time in five years that we consumed substandard bakery products in this fine town. I’m pretty sure we’ve learned our lesson, but can’t completely rule out the possibility that next time I’m in western Victoria I won’t make the same mistake again. We slid our pie-laden bodies back into Alyce and again took to the road that is both great and oceanic, passing through quaint Port Fairy en route for Portland. Before reaching the industrial seaside town, we stopped for petrol in Warrnambool, home of the magnificent Cheese World. A fellow tourist who had also stopped for petrol came over and asked if our car was a Holden Piazza. We excitedly said yes, indeed it was, hoping for an in-depth chat about the groundbreaking aspects of our research. ‘I thought so,’ he muttered as he wandered off. Way to get our hopes up, mate. Another couple then approached us and mentioned that they’d heard all about the Piazza Search. Once again, we got excited that the news had made it to such a far-flung outpost as Warrnambool, until they informed us they were Hobartians and had read about us in the local rag before they’d left. I don’t want to disparage the Hobart Mercury but given the


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‘The driver’s seat alone is a miracle.’ 37

laid-back nature of Tassie life and the lack of any ‘real news’, it’s not that hard to get a spot, and talented pets and comically shaped vegetables often make its pages (usually a lot closer to the front page than we did, but how can you compete with a dog that can bark Beethoven’s Ninth?). Seems our celebrity star had not risen to the dizzying heights we’d initially imagined. We got into Portland early in the afternoon, which was good as it gave us plenty of time to buy some beer, do some washing (for the first time on the trip) and catch up with the early evening Australian telly dramas. I know what you’re thinking. But for goodness sake, how could we be expected to go on historic walks through places we would probably never visit again when there was a stalker on the loose in Summer Bay?! Having been mates for a number of years, whenever Chris and I have the odd dispute we generally get over it pretty quickly. In Portland, however, I came close to permanently ending our long friendship and seriously jeopardised the Piazza Search. In a quest to improve the reception of the TV, I managed to kill it altogether. Chris was livid. I mean really livid. Initially there was the fuming, then came the prolonged sulking and a level of indignation I was fast starting to see as insurmountable. Indeed, he was only consoled when I finally found the courage to speak and told him Portland was covered by a regional television network and, as such, it was a couple of weeks behind the rest of the nation when it came to the antics of the good and notso-good folk of ‘Home and Away’ and ‘Neighbours’. To this day I don’t know if that’s true, but Chris bought it and harmony was thankfully restored.


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38 In Search of the Holden Piazza With no telly and no desire to actually go outside and experience what our new surrounds had to offer (I know, we’re hopeless—you may need to get used to that . . . ) we unpacked our guitars for a good old-fashioned singalong. Actually, the singalong mainly consisted of Chris singing something about how I had destroyed the television reception and that he was quite pissed off with me, but I was concentrating more on my Van Halen-esque shredding solo so I missed most of it. The music was apparently quite therapeutic as Chris soon lost interest in berating me and turned his lyrical focus to how our waistlines had expanded in the previous weeks. After working on The Vacationers’ next (well, first) hit single, ‘99 kilos each and rising’, we walked into town in search of a counter-meal. Portland, best known apparently for its production of gravel, also produced a couple of pubs from which to choose. We settled on what seemed to be the local. Luck was with us, it was ‘Schnitzel Night’, and we indulged in a massive Bavarian feast and ravaged the allyou-can-eat salad bar, for just $9.50. Sated, we had a few beers and a game of eight ball in the front bar before leaving the gravel-crushing patrons to the Portland Tigers netball team’s end of season celebrations and returning to our salubrious caravan park accommodation. The next day saw us enter South Australia for the first time in our quest and it felt like we were really making some progress as we entered our third state. Sure, we had plans to stop and take lots of touristy photos of each of the state borders we crossed, but the ambiguous signage at the Victorian–South Australian border, coupled with the fact we couldn’t really be bothered slowing down and to this day


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‘The driver’s seat alone is a miracle.’ 39

are not exactly sure where the border actually was, means you’re just going to have to take our word for it. The first thing I noticed when we crossed the border (or at least when I realised that we must have crossed the border) was the thinning out of road signs advising drivers to take a rest. Throughout Victoria, highway signs proclaiming ‘Drowsy Drivers Die’ and ‘A Microsleep Can Kill in Seconds’ were placed at such ridiculously close intervals along the roadside that you were in danger of ploughing into the sleepy bugger in the car in front because you were too busy reading the signs. One particular sign—‘Droopy Eyes? Pull Over Now’—made me wonder how Carlton coach Denis Pagan ever managed to get anywhere in Victoria. My theory on the proliferation of these signs is that Melburnians struggle if they have to go too far without their cappuccinos, macchiatos and lattes and need to be reminded to pull over for a caffeine fix when they’re out of the city. We stopped at Mt Gambier for lunch before arriving in Kingston1 in the early afternoon. Kingston is home of ‘Larry the Lobster’ (an oversized crustacean) and the somewhat less famous ‘Big Tractor’, a normal-sized Massey Ferguson affixed to the top of a pole not far from Larry. Kingston is a beautiful seaside town and seemed to sparkle in the brilliant sunshine. On a less romantic note, rather than improve the condition of my foot, the thong straps rubbing against my irritated skin had further inflamed it. The result was a rather hideous discharge emanating from the sores which had appeared.

1

All the tourist publications call it Kingston (SE), but most South Australians give you pretty funny looks when you say it like that.


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However, it must be said that so idyllic was the vista at Kingston that the sunshine seemed to make even the pus on my feet sparkle as well. As we unpacked Alyce, Joe commented, ‘Your feet don’t look all that healthy’ in a way that managed to sound both horrified and disinterested at the same time. Our accommodation at Kingston had one remarkably distinct feature to our previous nights’ lodgings. A couple of cute young girls had set up camp about 30 metres from our cabin. Despite the fact that both Chris and I had lovely girlfriends waiting for us at the end of the trip (hi girls), we figured it might be nice to make friends with the young ladies, you know, just to pass the time. There was only one way to do this, so we whipped off our shirts and kicked the soccer ball about on the beach in an attempt to get their attention. Sadly they were having none of it. Maybe taking off our shirts was going a little too far, given how much truck-stop food we’d consumed of late. With that clever little ruse bearing no fruit, we went into town to grab some sensational fish and chips and overpriced beer—$19.40 for a six-pack of James Boags Premium! Not worth it, even with the 5c per bottle cash-back at bottle depots (we took our empties with us in the car anyway). By this stage of the trip Chris and I had been indulging in James Boags Premium most nights. We’re not sure why, maybe it was because we weren’t all that taken with the local brews, or simply that we’re creatures of habit, but given our consistent purchasing of the fine drop we decided to keep track of the prices of a six-pack via the James Boags Premium Price Index (or JBPPI). Incidentally, there are some alarming arbitrage opportunities in Kingston for savvy beer entrepreneurs. We went to the town’s only other


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‘The driver’s seat alone is a miracle.’ 41 bottle shop later in the evening and purchased another six-pack of the same product for just $15.00. Having procured provisions we settled in to watch a video from Manager Wally’s extensive range at the caravan park store. After our macho display on the beach, we rented the fittingly testosterone laden Elf. Never let it be said that Chris and I are not complex men; however, the decision to rent this steaming pile of B-list crud was as much due to us showing our softer, sensitive sides as it was a consequence of Wally’s glaring at us because it was ten minutes after closing time and we’d been arguing about our selection for more than half an hour.


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Morning in Kingston marked a special occasion. It was April Fools’ Day and thus it was also the 19th anniversary of the Piazza’s launch in Australia, which we duly celebrated with a 300-kilometre drive into the South Australian capital city of Adelaide. Many things could have been said to mark this auspicious occasion, as we drove along the Princes Highway towards the City of Churches, but as it turned out only one word seemed appropriate. ‘Shit!’ exclaimed Joe, as the passenger-side rear vision mirror inexplicably fell from the car and smashed on the road. It was stinking hot as we drove through the Adelaide Hills so we made a beeline for Glenelg Beach and a swim. 42


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‘When you’ve settled in the seat, you behold an eye-filling array.’ 43

On a hot day, finding parking at Glenelg Beach is a bit like looking for positives in a Billy Ray Cyrus song, or haircut, but we were in luck and found a prime spot close to the sand. There was a plethora of signs indicating when it was and was not appropriate to park there and after debating the merits of said signs we decided to chance it. Heading for the water we had our first South Australian minor celebrity moment. A courier, having obviously spied Alyce, walked straight up to us and said he’d heard about our quest on the radio. We hoped that this would be a sign of good things to come and that Adelaide would prove to be a treasure trove of Piazzas. It wasn’t. The scene at the beach was one of brilliantness. The temperate ocean was gleaming and teeming with some of the best-looking female specimens one would hope to see. We entered the water feeling very old and pale (and a little dodgy) amongst all the young girls who had just knocked off work and school. Just as I was starting to think that we looked like the two shonkiest perverts going around, Chris said to me, ‘I hope I shut the boot’. We briefly glanced at each other and immediately made our way to the shore. We made it to the car just as a parking inspector was about to serve us with a fine. He pointed out that we’d been in a 5minute zone for about half an hour (more like an hour actually) and we in turn pleaded that we had simply misread the sign (if by misread you mean ignored). He had a look at the Tasmanian number plate and you could see from the expression on his face that the guy was mentally throwing us in the too-hard basket. ‘Be a little more careful next time boys,’ he said, before he walked off.


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44 In Search of the Holden Piazza High on our luck, we figured there might be a bit of sport in toying with the suggestible minds of parking inspectors and decided that from this point onwards we would not pay for parking anywhere for the rest of the trip, or until our clever ruse bit us squarely on our collective back pockets both figuratively and literally. Refreshed, we set off to Sturt, specifically Shane and Jen’s house, where Chris would be staying while we were in Adelaide. We had a few relaxing beers and a couple of games on their incredibly large pool table then I left Chris to do the relaxing while I went to the airport to pick up my girlfriend, Danni, who was coming to town for a quick visit. By the time I returned with Danni (via a bunch of wrong turns) the evening was approaching full swing. The barbecue consisted of an amazing spread of food and alcohol, with some ‘interesting stories’ and dirty jokes provided by our hosts’ friends Josh and Tina (there you go, you’re in the book). Tina had a particularly interesting story about a bikini wax she’d performed earlier in the day, but in the interests of keeping this fun for the whole family I’ll have to leave it to your imagination. When Joe and Danni called it a night and headed across town to their hotel, Shane (the Axeman) Atkins convinced me it would be a top idea to head down to the local shopping centre, home to Shenanigans nightclub. At the time I didn’t realise that this crappy-looking, Irish-themed chain of pubs would tempt us all over the country so I foolishly agreed. More beers followed and, while the obligatory cover band belted out a few crowd favourites, I set about trying to persuade the 7-foot-tall Axe that I needed to go home. I pleaded, explaining that I had some important people to talk


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to the following morning and it would not help if I was blindingly hungover. Axe just kept laughing at me, and ordering more rounds. If I had stuck to pints of beer I might, just might, have been okay. But I made ‘the switch’. The switch occurs around the time your body says to you, ‘Look mate, if you want to consume any more alcohol then you’d better do it in a small glass with ice because the belly just can’t take any more lager.’ At this stage my body usually prefers a lemon, lime and vodka. The last time I made the switch in Adelaide, a couple of years earlier, I ended up being kicked out of another similarly themed Irish pub. On that occasion we had endured a very long and hot day at the Adelaide Oval watching Australia play England in a Test Match before heading out on the town looking resplendent in our hats, shorts and t-shirts. I still blame the switch for thinking that the South Australians present that night would love nothing more than for me to turn my cap backwards and do my best Lleyton Hewitt ‘C’mon’ impersonation. Personally I thought the use of three bouncers to remove me was a bit of overkill, as by this late stage the only danger posed was of me falling asleep on top of someone. But I digress—back to Shenanigans. With my confidence sky high, I edged on to the dance floor where I attempted to demonstrate the traditional drunk white Australian male move; standing on the spot shaking furiously like I had been shot repeatedly by a machine gun. I then progressed to my signature move, which closely resembles a poor impersonation of an uncoordinated cross-country skier. Having exhausted my array of eye-catching dance steps, I waltzed (without 3⁄4


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timing) up to the band and requested a Crowded House song in honour of the band’s recently deceased drummer and funny man Paul Hester. To my overexaggerated elation, they agreed to play the classic, ‘Better Be Home Soon’. The band consisted of a ‘normal’-looking drummer, a freaky-looking bass player complete with very long stringy black hair, and a guy commanding a guitar, keyboard, synthesising laptop with a Madonna-esque microphone wrapped around his bald head. Oh and there was also a gorgeous lead female vocalist with sexy ‘come hither’ eyes. In my drunken state I thought that I was amazingly cool for requesting the song and the band played it perfectly, their rendition lifted to new heights by my standing alone at the front of the stage singing along at the top of my voice. Spent from my performance, I returned to Axe. A few more drinks, a couple more songs and before long Shenanigans was shutting. Somewhat inconceivably, the female vocalist with the eyes wandered over to me while the band was packing up and said how she thought my tribute was really touching, brushing my arm in the process. My tribute!!! . . . And my arm!!! I was fixated by her eyes and couldn’t believe that she was speaking to me. Unfortunately for everyone involved (mostly me I guess), I had by this stage lost all ability to converse in any sensible manner. She ended up walking away just as I was trying to say something about my extensive Crowded House collection. Back at Axe’s place our slurring words were replaced with nimble actions as we somehow progressed from sitting at the dining table and having a drunken chat to the most disgusting rotten banana fight I have ever been involved in.


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We splattered the previously spotless stainless-steel kitchen, designer lounge suites, dining table, chairs, carpet and each other’s faces before a truce was called. I woke up feeling more rotten than the bananas from our late-night antics. In the other room I could hear Jen mumbling something about a stain on their stain-proof carpet. That explained the aged fruit smell emanating from my hair and pillow. The next morning I drove Alyce back to Shane’s place hoping that Chris would be less hungover than I was. We were off to meet Marcus, our first South Australian Piazza owner, and while I was keen to continue the quest I was also keen for a bit of a nap in the passenger seat. But then Chris emerged from Shane’s house, or should I say, a bedraggled creature that could have been Chris. When I threw him the keys he threw them straight back and slowly shook his head. The boy was hurting. It was obvious that Chris wasn’t driving anywhere. What’s worse, Chris smelt strangely of banana and beer daiquiri. It seems he had tried to match Shane’s prodigious drinking talent and had come off second best. The trip out to meet our first Adelaide Piazza owner in Marcus covered much of the same ground that I had just traversed to pick up Chris. We skirted the city and headed north, past the hotel where Danni and I were staying, and kept driving. Then we stopped driving. This was so I could berate Chris for his pathetic navigation. I grabbed the street atlas and it wasn’t long before we eventually stumbled upon our target destination. Luckily for me and my hangover it was about 37 degrees as Joe brought Alyce to a stop in sunburnt suburban Adelaide. Although I was really, really not in the mood to talk about


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cars, or anything else for that matter, my spirits lifted somewhat when a young girl wearing a frilly nightie opened the door. When we asked for Marcus, however, the door was shut in our faces and the disappearing girl behind it said, ‘I’ll send him out to you’ in a cute and intriguing accent. While I was pondering the accent, the girl and the nightie, we were greeted by a young man in his early twenties with the same accent as the young girl who’d opened the door—though the somewhat South African twang was a whole lot less cute on this strapping lad and I quickly lost interest in anything other than the chance to lie down somewhere dark and quiet. I was dehydrated and dying and just wanted to get finished and home to bed as quickly as possible. Which was a shame really, because as well as being a genuinely nice guy, Marcus was easily the owner who was the most knowledgeable about the Piazza’s chequered history we had met to date. Marcus’s parents, acting on the advice of his older brother, had surprised him with the white Piazza for his birthday. The car was in need of a little bit of work on the body, but was in goods hands and as we spoke to Marcus about his car—what he had done to it, what plans he had for the future—I tried valiantly to keep up, mentally vowing never again to drink with the Axe. In stark contrast to me, Marcus showed a genuine interest in our car, particularly the fact that Alyce was a manual as his Piazza was an automatic. Ordinarily, I would have suggested that Marcus jump behind the wheel of Alyce to road-test her transmission—after all, he had kindly gone out of his way to contact us and show us his Piazza—but as the hot sun beat down on me and my hangover rose to new


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heights I mumbled something about our strict insurance policy, accepted the numbers Marcus gave us of other potential Adelaide owners and bade him a hasty farewell. At this point of the book I’d like to apologise to Marcus for Chris’s seedy demeanour on the day we caught up with him. As mentioned earlier, Shane is a formidable opponent in the drinking stakes, and unfortunately we had to cut short the Piazza meeting because Chris kept whispering urgently in my ear that he was going to spew. As it turned out Chris’s condition was a great excuse for us to declare a PFD. Despite the fact that no real tension had surfaced between us (apart from the episode when I’d wrecked the telly), it was great to have a break from each other. I wanted to spend time with Danni, and, just quietly, the red and yellow weeping sores on Chris’s feet were enough to make my stomach turn. While Joe spent a bit of quality time with his better half, I spent some quality time horizontal on the couch, occasionally groaning in pain. Eventually, however, the hangover subsided to the extent that I was able to accompany the Axe that night to Adelaide’s Football Park for the match between Port Adelaide and Brisbane. It was my first time to Football Park and it was certainly an interesting experience. We parked the car in a nearby suburb and made the 20-minute walk to the ground battling a howling gale and associated dust storm—after a perfectly still, oppressively hot day it was an eerie turn of events. As we lined up for tickets I sensed that a riot was about to break out. Some of the Port fans were irate to find that the cheap terrace seats had been sold so they would have to go for the more expensive seats. By the time we had settled


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into ours, I began to realise that Port fans are indeed an interesting mob who hold scant regard for modern dentistry. Sound like a harsh overexaggerated generalisation? It’s not. Following the dust storm came the rain, and following the rain came an ordinary spectacle as far as the game was concerned. The second half brought more settled conditions, but in the interests of personal safety I kept my barracking for the Lions as quiet as possible as the Brisbane boys came back from a 40-point deficit to lose by a mere 2 points. For those of you closely following the saga of my feet, as we drove home I toyed with the idea of asking the Axe, who just happens to be a podiatrist, if he might look at them, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So revolting were my crusty, decaying extremities that I was too embarrassed and hence continued to suffer in silence. It was a huge relief to wake up to the sound of Danni’s breathing rather than the rasping hack of Chris’s snoring from across the cabin. Chris and I didn’t have any plans until later on in the day so I took Danni for a look around the Port Adelaide markets. Feeling a bit guilty for meeting up with my missus while Chris had to endure many more weeks away from his better half, I dug around the various stalls for a little present to lift his spirits. I thought I had really hit the jackpot when I found cassettes of both the Toni Pearen and Jo-Beth Taylor singles until Danni pointed out that she’d actually spotted both tracks in Chris’s music collection . . . on CD. I wish! Anyway, after a fruitless search of the market, Danni and I met Chris at Wavell Showgrounds for the Adelaide International Motor Show. None of us were all that impressed with the new


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‘When you’ve settled in the seat, you behold an eye-filling array.’ 51 range of Proton utes, but apparently I’m buying Danni a motorbike for Christmas if the book sells okay. Normally if we went to a car show while on holiday it would prove a nice diversion from whatever our main business in the area was, but given the amount of time we’d both spent looking under bonnets over the past couple of weeks, Chris and I weren’t really all that enthusiastic about the Show. Danni, however, was dead keen to get her photo taken sitting in every convertible in the place. Maybe she is expecting this book to sell a lot better than I am. With our Adelaide Motor Show visit out of the way, and feeling refreshed from a PFD, we were back on the quest, heading north to Salsbury to meet Spencer. Having escaped the inner city, we cruised towards the more sparsely developed suburbs where Spencer lived in a modest brick house at the end of a cul-de-sac surrounded by ferns and a grassy yard. Spencer, a really nice older, large, bearded gent, had two Piazzas—a silver Holden and a white Isuzu—both of which were inoperable. But while the cars were a fair way from being ready for a return to Adelaide’s roads, we had no doubt that Spencer had a fair idea about what he was doing. His shed and backyard looked like they belonged to a bloke that could strip a car and put it back together in a couple of days just for fun. The silver Piazza, the ‘good car’, was sitting in the garage, with most of its panels missing and several unconnected wires crawling from under the bonnet. Spencer had the facilities at work to remove any rust and fully recondition all the panels and he was apparently right in the middle of the process. Unlike some of the younger enthusiasts we’d met, Spencer wasn’t about squeezing every ounce of


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horsepower out of his car, he just wanted to get it back into showroom condition. Why the silver car was designated the ‘good car’ is a mystery as both vehicles were a long way from being roadworthy. The white car around the back was an Isuzu import so that automatically lowered its status in our eyes. Spencer had procured his Piazzas from his workplace at a wreckers. He’d negotiated with his boss to buy the cars and spare them from death by crushing. Spencer thought that the silver was the nicer colour and got stuck into the task of restoring it to its original condition, while the white one was the Piazza-restorer’s necessity, a trust fund of the hard-to-find parts needed to get the main project on the road. As well as his Piazzas, Spencer had another toy that was all about horsepower; a German-made remote-controlled car powered by a ‘whipper snipper’ motor. Apparently, when not digging about under his Piazzas, Spencer could usually be found out in the paddocks thrashing his miniature dune buggy around. ‘The handy thing,’ Spencer said, ‘is that I wear the same steel-cap boots for this as I wear in the garage.’ Registering our puzzled looks, Spencer then explained that the supercharged remote-controlled car could easily break your foot if it hit you at full speed—the 2-stroke motor propelled the car to speeds of up to 90 kilometres per hour.


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The next morning we bade farewell to Adelaide, the City of Churches, home to two kindly Piazza owners and custodian of the ‘Mr’ business name phenomenon. Mr Antenna, Mr Bankrupt, Mr Blinds, Mr Bookcases, Mr Clean Air (I want to buy a franchise from this bloke and set up business in Mexico City), Mr Dishwasher, Mr DVD, Mr Globologist (who must surely know a thing or two about everything!), Mr Injector, Mr Networks, Mr Pedals, Mr Potato, Mr Spoiler, Mr Squeegee (a personal favourite) and Mr Waterbeds are just some of the ‘Mr’ businesses plying their trade in Adelaide. When we couldn’t locate a ‘Mr Perhaps Drunken Ideas Are Best Left At The Pub’ we set Alyce’s futuristic controls for Perth. 53


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All that stood in the way of our reaching Australia’s westernmost capital city was an ageing temperamental motor vehicle lacking airconditioning and a functioning cruisecontrol mechanism, and 2700 kilometres that included the notorious Nullarbor Plain. We passed the time thinking of celebrities (or just people we knew) whose initials corresponded to the distance markers on the side of the road. For example, as we cruised toward a pit stop at Port Pirie, designated by PP on roadside markers, we had Paulina Porizkova, Peter Phelps, Peter Parker (the cricket umpire and Spiderman’s alter ego) and, of course, Patrick Patterson (somehow it always comes down to West Indian cricketers). We made our way to industrial Port Augusta (Paul Anka, Peter Andre, Pamela Anderson, etc) and checked in to the Big 4 Caravan Park, mostly because it featured a pool, games room, internet access and pay television. It turned out that we didn’t use the pool, spent about five minutes checking our email and had one game of Rygar each in the games room. But, as you may have guessed, the pay TV was a different story. My philosophy is that there is no such thing as bad TV, and in keeping with this we checked out a bit of motorcross, some downhill skiing, highlights of an Andrew Symond’s century versus Pakistan, and then of course the obligatory ‘Neighbours’ and ‘Home and Away’. Come time for dinner and a thought occurred to me—though completely unintentional, we’d had Hungry Jacks for breakfast and McDonalds for lunch so it seemed only reasonable we should round out the day’s diet with a spot of KFC for dinner. The fast food trifecta if you will. With the temperatures still hanging about the high 30s and Alyce’s airconditioning showing no signs of miraculously returning to life, I was sure I could sweat off


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‘Holden Piazza. The name says it all.’ 55 all that deep-fried goodness in no time. Also, I had become mindful that my funds might not last the 18 000 or so kilometres we had in front of us and ‘the big three’ provided a generally sound level of nourishment at a reasonable price. Normally at work I’m a packed lunch kind of guy (i.e. stingy) but with the constant travelling it was hard enough to fit in a few good hours of TV viewing a day let alone find the time to make my own sandwiches. While in Port Augusta, where apparently ‘the outback meets the sea’, we took the opportunity to meet the man at the local bottleshop. It was the most heavily fortified bottle shop I have ever seen. At first I naively thought that they must sell a lot of 1986 Penfolds Grange there, but according to the bottleshop guy, the prison-style bars over the beer fridges were due to the problem with alcoholism in the local Aboriginal community. When our credentials checked out (i.e. we had money and weren’t already drunk), we were allowed to purchase our hardearned thirst quenchers. The JBPPI settled at a fairly reasonable $17 and we settled in for quiet night. We awoke to another glorious, fine not-a-cloud-in-thesky kind of day. After years of yearning for an extended break from work accompanied by an endless summer, it is difficult to describe the feeling of directly experiencing that yearning. With much enthusiasm I steered Alyce away from Port Augusta and the luxurious Big 4 Caravan Park en route to Ceduna. Perhaps it was too much of this enthusiasm, coupled with the open Eyre Highway and Alyce’s powerful 2-litre turbo engine, that led me to apply a tiny bit too much pressure on the accelerator. Or perhaps my booking was simply a matter of carma (a form of karma but involving a


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motor vehicle). Just prior to being pulled over I was cursing myself for not waving to a passing car that had enthusiastically waved to us. Whatever it was it didn’t go unnoticed by the long arm of the law, in the form of the South Australian Highway Police Patrol, not far from the small mining centre of Iron Knob (yep, we spent a good deal of time sniggering at the name too). As I was steeling myself for the next opportunity to wave, I suddenly realised there were flashing blue lights following me. I jumped on the brakes just as terrible thoughts of having Joe do all the driving for the remainder of the trip entered my head. Senior Constable Gruff (as I shall call him) requested that I step out of the car. I duly obeyed, praying that he didn’t: a) notice my lack of footwear; and b) having done a), notice the hideous condition of my rotting feet. Once Senior Constable Gruff had swiftly completed both a) and b) he requested that I produce my licence. He then asked me if there was any reason why I was going so fast. I felt compelled to respond that there was no reason not to be, but luckily I ended up mumbling an inspired ‘er, no Sir’ instead. It turned out that I was doing 126 km/h in a 110 km/h zone. I could hardly contain my glee, only moments earlier Alyce’s speedo had crept up to 134 (note: the authors do not condone excessive speeding . . . especially in a car renowned for its less than suitable road-handling capabilities). My glee disappeared soon enough when Senior Constable Gruff produced a speeding ticket worth $238. At the very least I had hoped that he would take pity on me because of my hideous feet.


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‘Holden Piazza. The name says it all.’ 57

After this we continued at a more sedate pace with less enthusiasm permeating the atmosphere. The altercation with the police probably explains why we weren’t all that thrilled to see the ‘Big Galah’ at Kimba. Don’t get me wrong. If I was four years old or had a penchant for large concrete birds, I would have been stoked. But as ours wasn’t a quest for oversized parrots we continued on our way. At our last petrol stop before Ceduna we met a couple of sales reps flogging their wares to the service station. One of the guys had heard about our search on the radio in Coober Pedy and couldn’t believe that he had met us. We couldn’t believe he’d heard about our search in Coober Pedy, nearly 1000 kilometres away. The Search for the Holden Piazza had gone outback! This certainly raised our flagging spirits as we would eventually be going to Coober Pedy, and were now sure that we would be treated like kings. Reaching Ceduna was achieved all the more quickly with Joe at the wheel, with his unblemished feet and speeding record. In line with our strict fearless travelling routine we found the trusty Big 4 Caravan Park and the local bottle shop where we procured a $20 six-pack of James Boags Premium (highest so far on the JBPPI). With a bit of time up our sleeves before ‘Neighbours’ and ‘Home and Away’, we decided to take a look around the seaside town. In doing so I encountered the South Australian long arm of the law for the second time that day. However, unlike the rotund Senior Constable Gruff, this time the constable who requested I perform a random breath test was a sexy-looking female. Though the fact that she made her poo-brown uniform look appealing probably meant that we had been on the road for


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far too long, following too many caravans containing too many 70-year-old women. Just as we were returning to the caravan park to settle in for the evening, Alyce decided that functioning gears were not necessarily a necessity for a motor vehicle about to tackle the Nullarbor Plain. The thought of crossing one of the world’s most desolate regions was worrying enough, but completing the entire journey in second gear was positively frightening. While it was a concerning development, we decided to pursue the most sensible option available to us. We ignored the shonky clutch and retreated inside our modest accommodation to discuss it over an overpriced beer. They say ignorance is bliss, and for two blokes without a mechanical bone in their bodies, truer words have ne’er been spoken. Later that evening we met a bloke, Graham, who was staying with his family in the cabin next to ours. We chatted knowledgeably (well, he did) about the price of petrol, where we had been, where we were going and seemingly how quickly one can get there. Graham had recently driven from Surfer’s Paradise in Queensland all the way to Perth in Western Australia in two and a half days! ‘Yeah, I left Surfer’s on the Friday and was in Perth for lunch on the Sunday,’ he said casually. ‘Did all the driving myself.’ (For the geographically challenged that’s about 6000 kilometres). We were guessing Graham did not employ our preferred method of travel whereby one gets up just in time to make the 10.00 a.m. check-out, meanders on until lunchtime, grabs a bite to eat, then finds somewhere to stay in the afternoon before sitting down to the evening’s soapies with beer and a pizza.


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Having ignored Alyce’s stubborn refusal the previous evening to engage a gear other than second, we woke with fear and trepidation, not knowing the extent of her problems. The lifting of the Piazza’s long sloping bonnet revealed an empty clutch-fluid reservoir. We topped it up and expertly pumped the clutch pedal in the hope that it would do something expert-like. It did. Soon we were equipped with all five gears again and ready to tackle the 500-kilometre drive to Eucla, which was just 11 kilometres past the South Australian–Western Australian border. It was another stifling day for driving, made almost bearable by having all of Alyce’s windows open. Alyce, Chris and I were all seeking respite by the time we reached the Nullarbor Roadhouse. Here, we spotted our first dingo of the trip. A weary, wary, mangy-looking specimen had taken up residence somewhere near the roadhouse to feed off the scraps of unhealthy tourist lunches from the cafe. After we polished off our own deep-fried treats, we were back on the road dodging the many obstacles as we went. For the dingo wasn’t the only native animal we’d seen that day. The Eyre Highway is littered with the literally thousands of rotting kangaroo carcasses. These cadavers, which have either bounced off cars or been ploughed through by the massive road trains that ply the highway, filled the car with aromas more pungent than our own. By this time Chris’s scabby feet had made their presence known in an olfactory sense and I suspect he was secretly glad to have the smell of decomposing roo to hide behind. The other unpleasant aspect of the trip was a phenomenon known as ‘the flight of the grey nomad’. Lengthy convoys of Winnebago campervans stretched out in front of us, with their


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60 In Search of the Holden Piazza blue-rinsed drivers (probably with names like Herb and Vera) determined not to break the speed limit, even by a little. Luckily their laden campers were no match for Alyce’s turbo-charged fury as we took every opportunity to zip past them. Not far from the roadhouse is the Head of the Great Australian Bight. We stopped at one of the many lookouts along the way and took in the breathtakingly stunning views of the imposing cliffs holding back the vast, encroaching Southern Ocean. Unfortunately, by the time Joe had answered nature’s call and dug around in the back for something or other, the convoy of retirees had streamed past us and would no doubt impede our progress again that day. Upon reaching the Western Australian border, we did the responsible thing and pulled over before entering the quarantine checkpoint to polish off the last of the apples we had bought at Port Augusta. We knew that it was illegal to take fresh fruit or vegetables across the border, but what we didn’t know was that apparently it was also illegal to cross the Nullarbor without an Esky. ‘Can I please take a look in your Esky?’ the quarantine officer asked as she walked towards the boot of Alyce. ‘No need to worry,’ I casually responded. ‘We don’t have one.’ ‘Just let me take a look in your Esky and you can be on your way,’ she said more sternly, as I opened the boot. ‘Um, we really don’t have an Esky,’ I replied less casually as she started to rummage through the contents of the boot. ‘Where is your Esky?!!!’ the quarantine officer asked for the third time. She was incredulous that we would consider crossing the Nullarbor without one. However, there’s not


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much room in Alyce’s boot and we felt more than adequately prepared with our packet of Arnott’s Family Assorted biscuits and the aforementioned apples. Just as I was starting to wonder if there was a fine for driving without an Esky, the officer let us through. At the turn of the 20th century Eucla was basically a small isolated stop on the side of the road where weary travellers could rest in rudimentary surroundings on their way to and from Perth. Not far into the 21st century and Eucla remained the same, but with a pool table. Its accommodation ranged from tent sites (we didn’t have a hammer to get our tent pegs into the compacted gravel), a bunkhouse (lacking the requisite television) or a small motel room (with requisite television). We chose the motel but it didn’t come cheap. We indulged in a lot of pool that night and, as you do on such journeys, struck up conversations with fellow travellers. Coincidently, for the third time on our trip in quick succession, we met someone who, upon learning that we were from Tasmania, told us that they were planning to visit Tasmania in Easter 2007. I’m sure there are plenty of people looking to visit the beautiful island state in Easter 2007 but we didn’t expect to meet most of them on our quest. We decided that when we got back we would need to inform the Tasmanian tourism bureau to be ready and gear up for when they all arrive. We retired to our room shortly after, contemplated selling Alyce to pay for an astromical bar tab and, armed with dodgy burgers, watched our favourite shows on the quarter hour. Seems this part of the world makes up its own time.


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Central Western Time (45 minutes ahead of the rest of Western Australia) is not officially recognised as an Australian time zone, but someone obviously forgot to tell that to the regional television programmers. At this point, after quite a few drinks, Joe decided that it might be worthwhile getting out the video camera so we’d have some documentary footage of our journey. Although we were equipped with two cameras and had been on the road for close to three weeks, we’d taken a total of four minutes of footage. Subsequent review of the tape made that night in an attempt to rectify this reveals two drunken idiots presenting their theories on the Summer Bay stalker. As inane as this was, it wasn’t long before it degenerated into a game of Tash or Hayley? Leah or Sally? Irene or Morag? For those unaware of how this game works, count yourself lucky. We got up early, by our standards, the next morning to find the motel’s large and previously filled car park completely empty. It seems proper travellers get up even earlier to put in the hard long drives. We slowly readied Alyce and ourselves for the longest single journey on our quest so far, the 713kilometre drive to Norseman, marking the end of our Nullarbor experience. Luckily the grey nomads left enough of the hideously expensive petrol for us to fill up not only Alyce but also the trusty jerry can we had brought with us. We set out with Joe at the wheel and in control of the CD selection. We didn’t get far before being flagged down by the local constabulary for another breath test. After Joe passed the test, Alyce was searched for drugs. Interestingly, the polite police officer gave us the chance to declare any contraband informally before he inspected the car. I wonder


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what would have happened had we had anything to declare. The officer gave Alyce a less than thorough going over: obviously not a Piazza owner, he missed all the best nooks and crannies for drug-hiding. While Joe passed the breath test and Alyce the drug search, we were still unable to be on our way. The officer’s female partner instructed us to remove the fluffy dice from the rear vision mirror or we faced a $50 on-the-spot fine. Seems good taste comes at a cost these days. In an effort to combat the blistering heat, Chris had adopted a rather unorthodox position in the passenger seat. Rather than the favoured feet-out-the-window posture, Chris had reversed this so that his head hung outside the vehicle and his feet rested up on the centre console, a little too close to my face. This new position meant that from a distance Chris probably looked liked a happy, if somewhat dim, Labrador with ears and tongue flapping in the breeze, but more significantly it meant that his festering feet were right in my line of sight. On top of the heat and the boredom, this revolting sight was just too much so when we cruised into Balladonia I demanded that we pull over for a bit of a rest. Chris was a little cranky as apparently he’d only just managed to get comfy, but I managed to distract him by pointing out the Skylab Museum which appeared to be Balladonia’s commercial capital. Warr loves that kind of junk. Besides, it would be a nice break before we tackled the remaining 180 kilometres to Norseman. Maybe I could even pull a quick driver change and settle into the passenger seat for a quick kip before we reached the bright lights of the ‘Town at the End of the Nullarbor’. I don’t think I improved Chris’s mood much when I suggested that the Skylab remnants perched atop the roadhouse and


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64 In Search of the Holden Piazza museum which he was excitedly pointing at were simply bits of old tin riveted together. Chris is quite renowned for his deep and abiding love of historical artefacts, travelling exhibitions and memorabilia, and will champion the merits of trivia to the bitter end. But, alas, this time he was forced to agree with my initial analysis as a quick stroll through the Skylab Museum seemed to point to the fact that just about everything in there had indeed been welded together in some enterprising bloke’s backyard. Notwithstanding my deep resentment at being fooled by imitation Skylab remnants, the remainder of our Nullarbor experience was much like the rest, an endless horizon punctuated by small shrubs and hardy eucalypts. Which was a little odd really, given the Latin meaning of Nullarbor is ‘no trees’. A couple of thousand kilometres back one of us might have enthusiastically commented on how whoever had named the area had been a lying so and so, and perhaps even suggested a rousing game of ‘Rename Australia’s Biggest Tract of Land’ (for the record I would have suggested ‘Alittlebitofbor’), but after the seemingly endless hours of driving, this sort of caper was getting pretty old. Still, we were happy to be reaching the end of this particular leg, though not before I drove the longest stretch of Australian road not containing a single bend. Ninety miles of sheer straightness while Joe slept on. I was dead tired as we approached the scheduled driver change but refused to pull over. In fact I probably shouldn’t have been driving at all by this stage—I was pretty sure I’d just spotted a bunyip— but I wasn’t going to swap seats until I got to turn that bloody steering wheel.


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Norseman was a smaller town than we’d expected. We weren’t really sure what we were expecting, to be honest, but the dot next to the town’s name looked pretty bloody big on the map compared to the other places we had stopped at recently. The town was a mixture of modern brick homes set amongst fast-ageing weatherboard buildings, and while marking the end of the Nullarbor, it still contained some Nullarbor features such as the heat and dust. One of its redeeming features, however, were camels fashioned out of corrugated iron grazing in the middle of the town’s main roundabout. Very impressive, even if it made it difficult to spot fast-circling traffic. As darkness descended, the next item on the list was to find some accommodation for the night (the onset of darkness provided a useful cue to seek accommodation—after the previous night’s Central Western Time discovery, Joe and I weren’t actually sure what the time was). While Norseman was smaller than we had expected, its strategic position at the end of the Nullarbor ensured that it was a popular place. To our great relief the manager behind the desk of Norseman’s only caravan park informed us that there was one vacant cabin. To our great annoyance though we were also informed that a couple were currently inspecting it to see if it met their requirements and thus were first in line to take it. Eventually an elderly couple returned to politely say it wasn’t up to their usual standard. One man’s trash is another’s treasure, and Joe and I promptly paid for a rudimentary cabin that more than satisfied our less-than-lofty criteria. With our own humps to fill we treated ourselves to a sixpack of James Boags Premium for only $14.20, the best point


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on the JBPPI yet—achieved here in the relative middle of nowhere. The woman serving at the bottleshop saw Alyce and enquired as to why we were looking for pizzas. Have I mentioned that Joe can get a bit surly after a day of napping in the sports bucket seat of an un-airconditioned car for about 10 hours? ‘If I wanted a pizza I would have stayed at home and phoned for one rather than driving half way across the bloody country,’ he spat back gruffly. Well, as they say, there are no stupid questions, just stupid people, and it had been a long day. We were up early for the short, relieving drive to civilisation, which on this occasion took the form of the picturesque seaside town of Esperance. After the previous day’s marathon effort, the 200-kilometre drive seemed like a quick trip to the shops. I was keen to push on to Albany (another 480 kilometres) but Warr wanted none of it. He insisted that we stay in Esperance to check out the sights and sounds. We grabbed a bunch of brochures from the information centre but first, however, we needed to find somewhere to spend the night. The Esperance Seafront Caravan Park certainly looked more upmarket than some of our previous digs. Occupying a vast expanse of land stretching along the coastline, the ESCP (as it’s referred to by those in the know and lazy authors alike) looked out over the stunning Bay of Islands to the south and the sleepy little town of Esperance to the west. Actually, compared to Norseman, Eucla and the like, Esperance was anything but a sleepy little town. All around the park, families sat, feet up, beers in hand, listening to the radio while fishermen busily cleaned


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‘Holden Piazza. The name says it all.’ 67 the day’s catch. Yet there was also a relaxed vibe, as if this was a good place to take it very easy. The only sign of trouble in paradise was a security gate which required guests to swipe a card and enter a pin number to pass. I wondered who, or what, they were trying to keep out. We could see as soon as we put the key in the lock that our latest home away from home was spacious, clean and had a telly. Very good. Once we walked in, however, we were greeted by a full-on olfactory assault. It was as if someone’s pet terrier had curled up its toes in there some time ago and management had made a concerted effort to expunge the odour with some sort of deodorising room spray. There was only a faint scent of Fido’s fumes but the stink from the aerosol was almost unbearable. Almost, but not quite, bad enough for two tired, cranky and exceedingly lazy adventurers to do anything about it save for breaking wind quite loudly and proclaiming that to be a vast improvement on the incumbent odour. Because it had only been a short journey, for once we had a lot of time to kill before the soapies were on. So we settled down to read the books that we had recently acquired from the book exchange we stumbled upon while looking for our accommodation. For the record, Chris purchased a lighthearted travel diary type book (don’t you hate them?) while I chose an Eric Van Lustbader novel. After this, and more importantly after checking the telly reception, we decided it was time to get out and see what Esperance had to offer. We grabbed the ESCP discount vouchers for the local mini-golf club and got back in Alyce for a cruise around.


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68 In Search of the Holden Piazza Things didn’t quite go as planned as we discovered that mini golf was closed, so we proceeded to the internet cafe to catch up with our loyal fans who were following our quest online. Having spent ages writing possibly the wittiest, most insightful diary update that the world has ever seen, I followed the idiotproof web updating instructions I’d been given and keyed in the appropriate sequence to make the page go live. The countless would-be Piazza-searchers around the globe living vicariously through us via the magic of the internet would be satisfied with this latest instalment. Just as my literary masterpiece was about to be unleashed on the world, disaster struck. The pithy observations, heartfelt emotions and comic perfection on the screen in front of me disappeared. ‘Oh my God!’ exclaimed Chris. ‘You’ve broken the internet!’ You didn’t need to be an expert programmer to see that something wasn’t right. I was reasonably certain that for once it wasn’t my fault so I gave Thommo (our trusty tech support mate) a call. Thommo confirmed that things had indeed disappeared, and, despite Chris’s accusations that I ‘broke’ not just our website but the whole internet, I had nothing to do with it. So, while I was vindicated, my masterpiece was no more. With webmaster Thommo on the case, we followed our usual philosophy of ‘bugger it’ and headed back to our cabin (via the mini golf, just in case, but no, it was still closed). We had big plans to sit about, watch ‘Neighbours’ and ‘Home and Away’ then go to the pub for a meal and to watch the mighty Cats in the Friday night game of footy. A workable strategy, except that some old Polish guy with a big white hat had shuffled off this mortal coil and his funeral was being telecast live when our fave soapies were supposed to be on. Sincerely hoping they’d


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‘Holden Piazza. The name says it all.’ 69 have finished putting the old bloke in the ground by the time the footy was scheduled to start, we headed down to the pub to wait it out. Cats went down. So did a lot of Emu Draught. While we were in the smoky little pub just off the main drag, Danni called and I had to step outside to speak to her because the Guns ’n’ Roses was cranking so loudly out of the jukebox. It was a classy venue. By the time I got back inside, Chris had been bailed up by one of the locals. He seemed like a nice enough bloke but had a few strong views on Maori land rights in his native New Zealand so I was happy to take my seat and watch the end of the game. Instead, I was bailed up by another local who introduced himself as Richo. Richo was tall, blond and as leathery as a crocodile-skin handbag. Apparently this aspect of his appearance was due to spending a fair bit of time on fishing boats (and probably the fact that he’d smoked three Marlboros in the time it took him to tell me that). Richo gave me a fair bit of ribbing for being from Tassie, that is until one of his mates pointed out that Richo himself was originally a Taswegian, though he hadn’t spoken to anyone there in 16 years. Although I don’t recall hearing an actual reason for his disdain for the Apple Isle, his expletiveridden rants made it pretty clear that he had no plans to leave Esperance any time soon. We would like to take this opportunity to inform Mr and Mrs Richo still living in Hobart that their lad is alive and well (although we couldn’t comment on his liver function). By the time the pub was closing, it was quite apparent that we’d had enough drinks for the idea of checking out the local nightclub, Spinnakers, to seem like a good one.


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70 In Search of the Holden Piazza Despite the dodgy exterior resembling an RSL, Spinnakers was just like any number of nightclubs I’d been to. Terrible music, outrageous bar prices, stifling heat and dozens of girls who wanted nothing to do with me all seem to be hallmarks of hip and happening nightspots the world over. The only remarkable feature of Esperance’s premier after-hours venue was its lack of lighting. While it’s not all that unusual for a nightclub to be a bit dark and mysterious, Spinnakers was close to pitch black. Then when my eyes adjusted, I noticed old barstools stacked in corners, completely bare walls and the PA system resting on top of milk crates—no wonder they kept the lighting sparse. Thankfully Chris announced that he was ready to pull stumps before I hit the dance floor. As we walked, or stumbled, back to the caravan park, I informed Chris that I was a dead certainty with the two girls in white t-shirts hanging around near the door of the nightclub. Chris then informed me that they were in fact the bouncers, and blokes, and the only reason they were giving me the eye was so that they could decide whether or not I should be physically ejected from their establishment. I woke up on the underdeveloped grey vinyl couch in the annex of the caravan trying desperately to pretend that the thumping on the inside of my skull was just part of a dream. A dream where I had woken up extremely hungover in Esperance after drinking far too much for far too long with an eclectic bunch of people. Seems dreams do come true. Still, a hangover wasn’t going to stop these two intrepid travellers; we had places to go and people to see. The place was Albany, 480 kilometres away, and the people we needed to see were young teenagers proficient in taking money in


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exchange for items such as chicken fillet burgers, chicken nuggets and fizzy drinks. Albany was the biggest town we had visited since Adelaide and it greeted us with the lowest temperatures and the first significant fall of rain that we had encountered so far on our trip. Our first stop, after expertly following some conspicuous signage, was the Albany Tourist Information Centre where we collected an array of caravan park brochures. Stopping at a town’s tourism information office and collecting caravan park brochures was a sensible process we would undertake often as we made our way around the country. What happened next was also a common occurrence as we made our way around the country. We got lost. After settling on a couple of suitable-looking tourist park options we set out to find them. It was easy apparently; the desired caravan park was 2 kilometres north of the Albany Post Office while the contingency option was 4 kilometres west of same said PO. In the 47 minutes it took us to find the Albany Post Office, I don’t think it once occurred to either of us that we should have asked the helpful staff at the Tourist Information Centre where the hell the Albany Post Office was. What made matters worse was that we ended up finding more than one post office and we also had no idea which direction was north or west. Driving around in circles in the rain while still trying to shake off filthy hangovers did not make for a pleasant time in the car. We eventually stumbled upon a caravan park that suited our needs—i.e. one where we could pinpoint its location. Incidentally, it was home to one of Australia’s crappiest minigolf courses and that afternoon it was frequented by two


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of Australia’s crappiest mini golfers. Up until this point of my life, I had never witnessed a lost ball in a game of putt-putt, but on this occasion it seemed to occur with alarming regularity. On a scale of crappiness this course nearly reached the dizzying heights of the crappiest-ever course, in Hahndorf in the Adelaide Hills, which consisted of long grass and weeds punctuated by differing lengths of garden hose. Luckily the mini links of Albany were slightly easier to play than the Hahndorf version, as neither of us was in any fit condition to be challenged. We played the back nine fuelled by our much needed Zinger™ burgers and retired to the relative safety of our caravan without either of us deigning to mention the possibility of exploring the night life in Albany. The next day we awoke with neither a hangover nor the notion that a deceased canine had resided in our accommodation at some juncture. A welcome result on both counts. On the agenda was a drive to Busselton via one of Australia’s finest wine regions, Margaret River. However, we underestimated the time it would take due to a network of winding roads. Roads with an abundance of corners were something we had not been familiar with of late. Crossing the Nullarbor was a straightforward driving proposition: on the Eyre Highway if you turned right you would end up in the unforgiving outback, if you turned left you’d end up in the unforgiving Southern Ocean. However, we weren’t in Kansas anymore, and Toto and I ended up traversing a lot of unexpected towns, all ending in ‘up’. Driving between a couple of ‘ups’ I noticed a puff of black smoke come in through the air vents of the car. Not


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another dead Pontiff, I thought, but said nothing, not entirely convinced that it wasn’t my imagination. As the cabin started to fill with noxious black fumes, it was decided that we should pull over and investigate the problem. A fairly cursory inspection under the bonnet revealed that there was no oil cap where once one had been, and oil was literally spewing out, igniting on the engine block and entering the car through the air vents. Despite not having even a tyre wrench that fitted properly, this was strangely enough one occurrence we had prepared for. The back-up cap was quickly located and we were soon on our way. Manjimup (yet another ‘up’) is home to the most drivethrough chicken outlets per capita in the Southern Hemisphere. In fact we found that there were more chicken outlets open than there were petrol stations as we hunted through the small town to fill up Alyce. Similarly Nannup was also an integral part of Western Australia’s principality of poultry restaurants. We gave Balingup and Boyup Brook a miss, although I’m sure they also offered an array of chicken fastfood options, as we found our bearings and headed for Margaret River and whatever purveyors of fine fried fowl awaited us there. The surf and wine Mecca of Margaret River is a thriving tourist town with a number of fine restaurants enticing weary visitors to come inside and sample the region’s amazing fare. As we wiped our mouths of the last remaining remnants of our meal from the local dodgy chicken outlet (hey, when in Rome) we headed down to the Margaret River Pub to meet some fellow Hobartians, Chris and Annabel, also on their way to Perth, albeit in a slightly slower manner than us.


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Apparently they’d been taking in all the sights along the way. Oh how indulgent one can be when not charged with such a serious responsibility as ours. However, it was great to catch up and swap our tales of travel. A general consensus was reached: we were all pleased that our respective cars had made it from Hobart—though they had an Esky. After polishing off some of Australia’s least-fine beers (Emu Draught, again, nasty stuff) we hit the road in Alyce hoping to find some accommodation in Busselton just as darkness was descending. As we drove off we lamented that we hadn’t had a chance to sample some of the local red wine. But we took solace in the thought that we weren’t here to find fine specimens of red, we were looking for a less than fine car of the 1980s. Bet you were starting to wonder when we’d get around to that again. Although we could have easily settled in for a few relaxing days in Margaret River we had to get a little closer to civilisation to continue our search. It was quickly decided that we could make a bit more progress in the failing light and head up to Busselton, closer to our ultimate destination of Perth. As we drove past dozens of wineries interspersed only by the occasional golf course, I started to wonder why we weren’t just spending the full three months in this part of the world. ‘Looking forward to catching up with a few Perth Piazzas?’ asked Joe, snapping me out of my daydream. I’d almost forgotten all about the important business we had to attend to. No golf today, but I had a feeling that I wouldn’t have to wait too long for a bit of a drink.


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‘Holden Piazza. The name says it all.’ 75 It was late and dark when we arrived in Busselton, even later by the time we found a suitable caravan park, some nice Italian takeaway and a JBPPI that was too high for our liking. We sat down to watch some telly but the only clear channels at the caravan park were Fox Footy and the closed-circuit security cameras. Not much action at the pool, or jumping pillow, and sadly the change room camera wasn’t working (just kidding . . . it was clear as a bell). As we sat around the cabin our enthusiasm for the quest began to grow anew. We were just a day’s drive from our fourth capital city of the journey and were curious to know what sort of Piazza action we’d witness in Perth. Importantly, Alyce had survived the mammoth journey from Adelaide in one piece, and equally important, to him at least, Chris’s festering feet had not yet dropped off. As unsightly as it was, I was glad his condition hadn’t deteriorated to the point where he would be unable to undertake his fair share of the driving duties.


6

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‘Take a fast, sweeping curve and you discover this is no boulevarde show-car.’

‘Take a fast, sweeping curve and you discover . . .’

The next day, another extremely hot one, saw us on our way to our third capital city of the trip. But before we hit the tarmac we decided to take a look around the aptly named bustling town that is Busselton. While located on the shores of the beautiful Geographe Bay and the Vasse River, it is home to a more important feature—the Southern Hemisphere’s longest wooden jetty. It’s nearly 2 kilometres of wood stretching far out to sea. The walk out to the end of the jetty is a fair effort indeed but the rewards are certainly worth it . . . apparently. We wouldn’t have a clue what’s at the end of the jetty; it was just too far for us. We were dog-tired from sitting down for two weeks in Alyce so we were in no state to walk anywhere. 76


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‘Take a fast, sweeping curve and you discover . . .’ 77

Those like us who are less inclined to attempt the saunter can catch a small train to the end of the jetty and back, but it wasn’t working the day we were there. We did have a quick look to see if we could take Alyce along for a spin but it seemed the local governing body was reticent to allow 2-litre turbo coupes on the jetty, or any other cars for that matter. With that plan thwarted there was nothing else for it but to push onward to Perth. I’m not sure why I was the designated navigator for Perth, as it was my first time in Australia’s westernmost capital. I’m sure Chris didn’t really know where we were going either but he managed to throw around suburb names like Claremont, Northbridge and Cottesloe with such bluff and confidence that I (wrongly) assumed that he’d be able to find our abode for the next week with minimal assistance. However, my help and our map were both insufficient and eventually we sought advice on how to locate our destination, Bassendean, a northeastern suburb of Perth, from a kindly old gent who was more than happy to point us in the right direction. In fact, he was more than happy to tell us a lot more. ‘You keep heading along this road until you pass the bridge,’ he stuttered slowly, very slowly. ‘Then you turn left, then right after about three minutes. Keep going until you cross the train tracks and you’ll be there. You know, I haven’t been to Bassendean for a long, long time. Played bingo there I did. Biggest bingo hall in the Southern Hemisphere. I remember when . . . ’ Chris and I were grateful for the directions but in no mood to chat about the good old days of the Bassendean bingo scene so we thanked him and zoomed off, feeling a bit guilty for disappearing in mid-conversation.


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We eventually made it to our hosts, Brendan ‘Prong’ Long and Marcus ‘Marcus’ Hope, and celebrated our achievement in a manner befitting, with a meal of beer and pizza. Incidentally, Bassendean is the birthplace of Rolf Harris and, apparently, home to the Southern Hemisphere’s largest bingo hall. The next day our search for our first Western Australian Piazzas began in earnest. Joe opted to stay on the couch while Marcus, Brendan and I headed to the local golf course just to make sure there weren’t any stray Giugiaro creations lingering in the course’s car park. Unfortunately for me there was neither a Piazza spotted nor a birdie sunk for the morning. The rest of the day, in no particular order, involved lazing around, drinking beer, lazing around, media commitments, drinking beer, thinking about how to find some Piazzas and . . . drinking beer. While the other boys strolled around the greens pretending to be golfers, I did some important work back at home base. This basically involved contacting the local television stations to see if we could get on their news or current affairs shows as their weekly ‘check out these wacky guys’ story. I figured we’d be a shoe-in for the Perth edition of ‘Today Tonight’. For the benefit of those who have never had the viewing pleasure, it actually contains less news and current affairs than its East Coast equivalent. ‘Impossible,’ I hear you say. Sadly not my friends. In any case, it would seem that while their standards might be lower in the West, even they won’t stoop as low as us and our phone calls and emails went unanswered. Another fine Perth day greeted us and when we finally got moving we decided to visit the Port of Fremantle.


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Fremantle is home to some of Australia’s finest boutique breweries and good-looking women. It is also home to an extensive array of restaurants and cafes. I’m sure you could eat at a different place for breakfast, lunch and dinner, each day for a year, without doubling up. On this day Joe and I headed to the small brewery that is Little Creatures and indulged in glasses of pilsner, dark ale and pale ale pulled cold straight from the massive beer vats. While it was still early in the day, we didn’t feel bad about our early start on the beer—because of the time difference, it was after noon in our native Hobart. Perhaps the finest feature of the Little Creatures brewery is the men’s toilets. Here, the urinal lies just under a massive expanse of glass where relieving patrons can look out over the brewery floor at the workers going about their important duties of making beer and filling bottles. There’s something quite satisfying about being so close to the entire cycle of the beer-making and drinking process. Reluctantly but wisely we eventually decided our stomachs needed lining and left the brewery for some waterside fish and chips. ‘Freo’ is a beautiful mixture of 19th-century port buildings with more contemporary luxury living. On a peerless bluesky day, Joe and I explored the historic precinct and the harbour area on foot until were confident that we would pass a breathalyser test before getting back into Alyce. We headed back to Bassendean via Cottesloe Beach. Readers familiar with the Perth and Fremantle areas will know that Cottesloe Beach is the site of two of Australia’s best pubs. Not only do the Cottesloe and Ocean Beach hotels host some of the biggest Sunday afternoon sessions one would ever


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see, they also attract some of the finest examples of the female form. I went there a couple of years back and spent the afternoon lamenting my lack of confidence, inability to speak when drunk and the part of my genome which provided my slightly less than model looks. This particular day wasn’t a Sunday but the crowd enjoying the calm waters and 34degree heat was certainly very attractive. As we wandered along the beach, hiding our darting eyes behind our sunglasses, we regretted not bringing our Speedos with us. Quite frankly I’m glad that I didn’t have to witness Chris in a pair of budgie smugglers, but a quick dip at Cottesloe would have been quite nice. That night we took part in a tradition started by a number of displaced Tasmanian schoolmates of mine who were living in Perth. Whenever any of ‘the old crew’ make their way to town, they are treated to a display of sporting prowess by the Hyde Park Hotel’s Easy Tigers basketball team. The Tigers are comprised of a core group of ex-Taswegians who escaped to the more pleasant climate of Perth, as well as a rotating roster of their friends and workmates or more or less anyone they can talk into a game. Despite going down by 8 points to their opponents from a rival pub, the boys put on a show for us. They were certainly pretty flashy, if not always strictly within the rules of the game. Highlights were Adam ‘Lips’ Darkos’s huge 3-point bomb, Xavier ‘The X’ Miller’s massive rebounds, Mark ‘Weapon’ Webberley’s tip in, and Jason ‘Clarky’ Clark’s on-field leadership. Again, as per tradition, it was off to the Hyde Park Hotel to wrap up with a bit of a punt on the dogs and a stack of jugs. I was having a great time with all my old schoolmates and headed back to


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‘Take a fast, sweeping curve and you discover . . .’ 81 Weapon and Clarky’s place in Mt Lawley in high spirits while Chris retreated to Bassendean. I woke up pretty sore again, and after speaking to Chris on the phone we decided it might be a good day to do not very much at all. My first priority was to get home. My hosts for the evening had quietly snuck out to work, leaving me to catch up on some much needed rest. So with my tongue like sandpaper and sweat dripping from every pore in my body, I trudged back to Bassendean. This would normally be a pleasant walk but with the sun beating down on my hungover form, I was forced to send out an SOS and ask Chris to come and get me. That afternoon we had to save our energy because Prong had promised us a bit of a treat later in the evening. While we waited for him to get home from work, we attacked his DVD selection. As an indication of how our brains were working at the time, we settled on Lilo and Stitch and, disturbingly, enjoyed it. At around six o’clock Prong walked in the door and, rubbing his hands together and with an evil glint in his eye, announced that we were heading off to ‘Skimpies’ (apparently a Western Australian institution) at the working-class Redcliffe Hotel. The Skimpies tradition is a pretty simple one. Beers are served by barmaids clad in skimpy attire, and every hour, on the hour, the ladies dance around the bar and flirt with patrons. Top stuff Prong! We reluctantly left the Redcliffe for the well-heeled suburb of Como where we enjoyed some of the most substantial food we had experienced in a long while. Sitting down in the classy open-air restaurant to some fine eye-fillet steaks was a long way from alcohol-fuelled miners throwing punches at each other while young ladies danced in underwear. Ah Perth, you’re nothing if not diverse.


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82 In Search of the Holden Piazza Friday morning broke and a sense of dread pervaded the air. It was finally time to resume the quest and meet some more Piazza owners. Don’t get me wrong when I say ‘dread’, because we actually enjoyed catching up with all the owners and, hell, if it wasn’t for them we’d look pretty silly tooling around the country in our over-decaled fun wagon. It’s just that we’d spent the past four days drinking beer in the sun and aren’t generally keen on anything that approximates work. Keen not to repeat the navigational embarrassments of our first day in Perth, we managed to secure a street atlas from Prong before we headed off through the leafy suburbs towards our first Western Australia Piazza. Given that neither of us really knew our way around we’d established a new system of planning our route before we headed off. Instead of crawling around, missing turnoffs and having to backtrack, we guided Alyce around Perth’s suburbs as if we’d lived there our whole lives. Our destination today was Como, and we were going there to meet Mark who had contacted us to see if we could help him with a dashboard issue. We were fairly confident that we wouldn’t be able to and that it wouldn’t be too long before Mark realised we were the wrong people to ask. We pulled up at Mark’s place to be greeted by a strapping lad wearing what seems to be the official Western Australian uniform (trackie dacks and a tank top) with his slavering beast of a dog. After extending our hands to Mark, Chris had a bit of a brown trouser moment as he did the same to the dog and almost lost his arm from the elbow down. ‘I’ll chain him up around the back,’ offered Mark. Probably a good idea.


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‘Take a fast, sweeping curve and you discover . . .’ 83 Mark was 21, a mechanic and had owned more than 70 cars in his driving life. The Piazza was number 69 and a project he was working on for his girlfriend. From the carport of his house, the tanned mechanic told us his story, and immediately it became obvious to Chris and I that he was wise beyond his years— although we were both a few years older than Mark, we had not even considered such responsibilities as buying a house and raising a family. Mark explained how he had graduated from hanging around the sprint-car circuit as a kid to gaining a qualification and making cars his life in a more serious way. As we flicked through the photo album of some of Mark’s past projects, including a couple of Golfs and an extremely idiosyncratic semi-auto Daihatsu, we came across his former pride and joy, a Holden HQ one tonner. Mark had clearly put a lot of time and effort into this one and gave us the full statistics and performance figures. He also gave us the reason why he’d had to give up on his dream car. After spending much time and money working on the engine, Mark had shifted his attention to the HQ’s exterior. Unfortunately his brilliant idea of doing up the tray with polished chequer plate didn’t go down too well with the local constabulary, due to its tendency to completely blind other drivers when it was too sunny. I’ve gotta say it looked fantastic although I wouldn’t want to be driving behind it on a bright day. As well as his own cars, Mark had also worked on sprint cars and various projects for mates, yet he had little to say about the blue Piazza in his carport. It was clearly in need of a bit of work (i.e. a working engine, and the odd panel here and there) and, like the previous Piazzas undergoing re-builds that we’d


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84 In Search of the Holden Piazza met, it was a long way from being on the road. Considering his previous successes, Mark was strangley taking his time with this project. Chris and I exchanged dubious glances, wondering why Mark was less than enthused. In fact, Mark explained, he only had the Piazza because his girlfriend thought it was ‘cute’. In fact, the ‘cute’ project sitting in Mark’s carport was the bane of his existence as it was taking up precious space, time and income. Although we never met Mark’s partner, we hope she was grateful for the effort her fella was putting in. Satisfied with a hard day’s work we left Alyce at Prong’s and jumped on a train towards Mt Lawley. Except it actually stopped at all stations except Mt Lawley so then we grabbed the next train to Mt Lawley from wherever it was we ended up, We finally arrived at Clarky and Weapon’s place, having arranged to partake in a bunch of beers with them in front of the footy. Chris was the only North Melbourne supporter in the place and was very happy when the Roos managed to beat Collingwood by 3 points. Although details from the latter part of the evening are a little vague, I think we managed to call every taxi company in Perth before a cab finally showed up, allowing us to stumble into bed at around 3.00 a.m. I wasn’t happy when next I looked at the clock: it was 11.00 a.m. We were due to meet with two Piazza owners, Chris and John, not far from our base in Bassendean. Although we only had a short drive in front of us this morning, it was down to the toss of a coin to decide who was going to pilot Alyce down the road to meet them. I was the lucky winner and nominated that a dishevelled-looking Mr Warr be the one to drive us the couple of kilometres parallel to the railway tracks to the designated address. From my position in the passenger


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‘Take a fast, sweeping curve and you discover . . .’ 85 seat I made a mental note of the location of a number of friedchicken eateries which would almost certainly be visited after we’d taken care of business with the newest members of the Piazza Search family. Chris and John were two mates who had a Piazza each, although apparently the cars changed hands between the two of them on a fairly regular basis. John was the proud owner of a black Piazza, while Chris’s was a horrible matte white colour. Chris was a bloke who seemed pretty keen on his car so we were pretty surprised at the awful paint job. But he immediately explained that he was in the process of fixing it after the car had been stolen and taken a beating at the hands of some thrillseeking thieves. ‘Dunno why anyone would want to steal the old Piazza,’ he mused. ‘I have enough trouble getting it started with the key, so the thieves must have really struggled.’ Trying my hardest to appear sympathetic, when I was actually struggling to stay vertical, I pointed to the dodgily assembled stereo—essentially large speakers with loose wires protruding everywhere set into a wooden box—and said, ‘So they ripped off your stereo too. Bummer.’ The formerly proud face staring at me turned ashen. Chris was quite proud of his DIY sound system and I think he was a bit insulted that the thieves didn’t steal it when they took the car. Oops! Time to pursue a different line of questioning. Fortunately Chris was both forgiving of my gaffe and also quite a perceptive bloke as he noticed that we seemed to be dying and immediately offered us a medicinal beer. While the beers definitely improved our moods, we were a little disheartened to discover that both of their Piazzas were actually Isuzus;


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86 In Search of the Holden Piazza however, our interest in the morning’s meeting was renewed when John mentioned that he was involved in his own little oddball quest. Like Spencer from Adelaide, John was keen on remote-control cars, though John was taking his interest a step or two further— he had his sights set on the radio-controlled car land speed record. However, while he was getting close to the mark, he had recently experienced a few problems in his pursuit of the title. According to John, power wasn’t an issue, but stopping the tyres from exploding was. Luckily John had managed to track down a supplier in Germany who claimed to have some suitable rubber for the world record tilt so things were back on track. It was something we could relate to, having had the exact same problem on day one of our journey with Alyce. Wishing Chris and John all the best and thanking them for the much-needed beer, we dragged our sweaty carcasses home to partake in an afternoon of recovery. As Chris and I lazed about Prong’s loungeroom, we had visitors in the form of a couple of Mormons doing a bit of the Lord’s work in Perth’s northern suburbs. I think I surprised them by enthusiastically grabbing the literature they were offering and requesting that they come back in a couple of weeks once I’d had a chance to digest a number of articles on the evils facing the youth of today. I chuckled to myself as I pondered the thought of Prong having a future Sunday afternoon interrupted by a couple of enthusiastic God botherers expecting as warm a welcome as they’d received on this occasion. Before nightfall we went and saw Phil, who had kindly contacted us after Joe’s mate Xavier had accosted Phil’s wife in a car park when he had seen their blue Piazza. Phil, a


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dentist who lived in Mt Lawley, literally just around the corner from where we’d been drinking the previous night, owned a massive house complete with tennis court and swimming pool. In terms of its resemblance to the original Giugiaro creation, his car was easily the best example we had seen so far. Bought straight from the showroom (Cary was the only other owner so far to have his car from new), it even had the original mud flaps. Phil invited us around the back for (you guessed it) a beer. Indeed not just a beer but a James Boags Premium (obviously the cheapest on the JBPPI index so far!) and as Phil knew as much about cars as we did, i.e. bugger all, for once we could have two-way conversations rather than grinning stupidly while being regaled with technical motoring speak. As we chatted, we got the impression that Phil’s wife had made plans for the family that Phil was none too enthusiastic about. The lady of the house came in a number of times to remind Phil that he had to get ready for whatever it was they’d planned to do that evening, but the turbo-loving tooth doctor’s response was to repeatedly utter a dismissive ‘yes dear’ and offer us another beer. Sensing the tension that was slowly building in Phil’s palatial home, Joe and I declined the third kind offer and hastily devised a bogus excuse to head off and leave Phil to whatever duties his wife had planned for him. Feeling slightly healthier than we had the previous morning, the sunny Sunday saw us heading south to the semi-rural suburb of Wellard to meet Daryl. Daryl had bought a decrepit red Piazza for his son four years ago as a project to work on—unfortunately his son then bought a perfectly good Peugeot and soon found


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88 In Search of the Holden Piazza that a working vehicle was a lot more fun than one with no wheels and promptly lost interest in restoring the crippled Piazza. As a result this once-proud beast had been sitting idly up on chocks on the front lawn for quite some time. Daryl, an engineer, seemed to have a fondness for playing around with toys of all sizes and had restored a few cars with great success. However, he admitted that even he was about to give up on the restoration. Daryl had tooled around with cars, boats, motorbikes and go-carts, and the Piazza was an affront to his sense of mechanical logic. ‘It just doesn’t make any bloody sense,’ he exclaimed in exaspertion. ‘It’s the most over-engineered piece of equipment I’ve ever seen.’ Apparently, had Giugiaro thought to send a copy of the Piazza blueprints out to Big Daz from Wellard, he’d have had a much lighter, lower-cost little coupe on his hands. Time had run out for Daryl’s Piazza. When we spoke to him, he was planning to offload it to good home as he and his family were on the verge of packing up and moving to Chicago for a couple of years. I was sure he’d have a lot less trouble finding buyers for the Porsches, PT Cruiser, go-carts (he and his youngest son race them), Vespa and other assorted toys. Battling our envy at all the things Daryl’s kids got to play with, we thanked Daryl, wished him luck and headed back to Bassendean for our last night in Perth. In order to save Alyce and her drivers from another arduous run across the Nullarbor, we decided the best option would be to book her on the train back to Adelaide while we made our way in all the style and comfort of Qantas economy class. The trip from Adelaide to Perth had taken us more than a week, but the trip back was merely hours


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(although Alyce would arrive in Adelaide a couple of days after us). I guess we could have continued driving up the Western Australian coastline and eventually on to Darwin but we had figured—rightly or wrongly—that very few Piazzas had made it as far as the Kimberley and we weren’t quite willing to see if ours would make it either. Instead we settled on heading north from the South Australian capital to the red centre and in doing so take Alyce and ourselves to see the Big Rock. Before leaving Perth, however, we had one more Piazza (of sorts) to see. Charlie and Daryl (another Daryl, not the Wellard one) were a couple of blokes who ran a business in Perth’s outer suburbs manufacturing components for light aircraft and sports cars. Because of the nature of their work, they had the tools and know-how to build a sports car just for a bit of fun. Their Piazza was like none we’d ever seen before—nor were we likely to see its kind again. We’re not normally in the business of responding to people who have ripped the engines out of Piazzas for other causes (usually Geminis—the arch enemy), but this was something altogether different. Essentially it was a chassis and fibreglass body powered by a Piazza turbo motor! Given that they had a mutant Piazza, the guys were almost as intrigued with our car as we were with theirs. There was little question which one would go faster, but without Alyce’s plush interior and myriad lights and buttons on the console what was the point? We got the impression that Charlie might have been the brains and impetus behind the operations—he and his company had previously worked on vehicles which had successfully


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broken Australian land speed records—while Daryl, an accomplished mechanic in his own right, was the enthusiastic test driver. Though Daryl was some years older than me, it was soon clear that his body carried a little less size and weight than mine. Whether or not it was my recent increase in fast-food consumption or not I’m unsure, but I soon regretted taking up the boys’ offer to sit in the car. Trying to slide into it, I quickly realised that my arse wasn’t going to squeeze past the sides of the car, let alone fit on the seat. I quickly untangled myself from the beast, announcing that it was lucky I wasn’t the designated test driver; even if I could fit in the car, I would have no doubt prevented it from reaching its top speed. Our intriguing meeting with Charlie and Daryl marked the end of our Western Australian experience. It was a slightly sad time for us. Perth had been a beacon as we had made our way across the dusty, open spaces at the bottom of the map, and while we thought it was a fairly impressive effort to get Alyce and ourselves this far, on our way to the airport the harsh reality sank in—we had only completed a small portion of our trip. There were still many long hours in Alyce ahead of us, coupled with the worry that her (and our) ageing bodies and internals might not make it.


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‘Piazza is fully imported, in limited numbers, and unusual in more ways than one.’

‘Piazza is fully imported, in limited numbers . . .’

Our time back in Adelaide—so as not to appear like two of the most boring freaks in the world—can be summarised thus: Dr Phil, fast food, beer, a Melissa George movie, oh, and did someone say porn shoot? Despite having to surface before 7.00 a.m. on Friday I was pumped up and quite looking forward to the day. This was partly because after four days of doing very little we were about to collect the lovely Alyce from Keswick Train Station; however, the real spring in my step came from knowing that today was the day we would be attending a photo shoot, a nude photo shoot, for Picture Magazine.

91


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92 In Search of the Holden Piazza We put Alyce through a quick car wash to remove the train’s diesel soot from her duco and get her looking her glamorous best before driving down to Glenelg Beach. As we sat at the pre-arranged meeting spot and waited for the photographer and model to turn up, we couldn’t help but feel a little jittery. Believe it or not, Chris and I are actually quite civilised (sometimes) and simply didn’t know what we’d got ourselves into. Unsure of what to expect, and hoping it wouldn’t be too sleazy, perhaps our greatest fear had been stirred up the previous evening when Shane, our host and avid Picture reader, made the comment ‘I bet she’s a slapper’. Having talked up the prospect of a Picture shoot to quite a few friends, we would indeed look pretty silly if some heavily tattooed, middle-aged housewife showed up to sprawl herself across the bonnet. ‘Oh well,’ I thought, ‘at least she’ll make the car look good.’ Just before 10.00am, Carol the photographer turned up, complete with baby Angus, Paul the babysitter for the day and a gorgeous young blonde model named Nataalie. Fun for the whole family, apparently, not at all the sleazefest we’d feared. Despite the adverse conditions, i.e. trying to do a nude photo shoot (Nataalie, not us) mid-morning on a stinking hot day at the beach during school holidays, Nataalie seemed to take it all in her stride. However, the same can’t be said for the majority of the good folk of Adelaide who happened to wander by. And of course we had to be conscious of the fact that some people might be just a little offended by the sight of a young lady running about starkers. So during the shoot Carol and Paul acted as spotters and upon their call of ‘jogger’ or ‘pensioner’ or ‘mum and kids’,


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‘Piazza is fully imported, in limited numbers . . .’ 93 Chris and I had the enviable role of huddling around the naked Nataalie so she was not left exposed in the middle of the street. But as the morning progressed, and joggers, pensioners and tourists passing by became more frequent, we decided it might be easier to move to a quieter location. This meant driving down the beach a little. Chris went with Carol, Paul and Angus, while Nataalie accompanied me in Alyce. Driving a little red sports car with a naked model sitting beside me was on my list of things to do before I die, so I can now shuffle off more happily. However, the experience wasn’t quite as straightforward as you’d imagine (assuming you imagined this would be straightforward), and manoeuvring into a spot for the photos was quite difficult given the distractions I had to contend with. I’ve mentioned before that I’m not the best driver in the world, so you won’t be surprised to hear I managed to stall Alyce a number of times before I had parked as per the photographer’s instructions. Although the stretch of beach frontage we’d picked wasn’t much more secluded than the last spot, we dispensed with the security huddle, opting instead to do the shots as quickly as possible. This resulted in a steady stream of vehicles doing laps and coming through for more than one glimpse at our (well, mostly Nataalie’s) activities. A couple of joggers even ran past us only to turn around 50 metres down the road and come back for another pass. While Chris and I had somehow managed to remain pretty composed throughout the photo shoot, when Nataalie finally climbed off Alyce’s bonnet and we caught a glimpse of her bright red backside, it was almost impossible not to smile. Perhaps in the interests of Nataalie’s occupational health and safety we


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94 In Search of the Holden Piazza should have allowed the engine to cool down a little before making her sit on the bonnet. ‘Tough job,’ one fella commented on his third pass. Chris and I had to agree. With Nataalie off Alyce’s bonnet, we left Adelaide, driving back to Port Augusta en route to Coober Pedy and eventually Darwin. It was a fairly uneventful trip, punctuated with a stop at the Port Wakefield bakery. It was here that Joe pondered whether we could navigate our way around Australia using only the small maps on the back of bakery bags to guide us. We agreed that it would be a difficult proposition, made more difficult by our pathetic navigational abilities and the inconveniently located pepper sauce gravy stains, but worth a shot. After a quiet night at the Port Augusta caravan park, having only recently paid my speeding fine upon our return to Adelaide, I was pleased to ignore the left turn onto the Eyre Highway and the sign pointing to Iron Knob (he he he) and instead head north onto the Stuart Highway for the 540kilometre drive to Coober Pedy. It was on this stretch of road that we finally encountered the stereotypical outback scenery. This was lucky for me because earlier that day Joe had forewarned me that if he didn’t see any of the bright red dirt he’d been promised, there was going to be trouble. The temperature was also very stereotypical outback— bloody hot, and further accentuated by Alyce’s lack of airconditioning. We drank litres upon litres of water that day and worried excessively about Alyce overheating. We decided at one point to give her and ourselves a rest from the driving and pulled into a roadhouse in a tiny stop named Glendambo.


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‘Piazza is fully imported, in limited numbers . . .’ 95

Here, we encountered a Japanese bloke with hundreds of stickers plastered all over his motorcycle. The stickers ranged from Hobart to Helsinki, and he had obviously ridden the world many times over on far lengthier road trips than Joe and I could ever imagine undertaking. While Joe and I struggled to find shade to gulp down our water, our Japanese friend sat comfortably in the sun tucking into some food and washing it down with a VB. We got the feeling he had done this all before. On the last stretch before finally reaching Coober Pedy, Joe and I talked at length about our continued use of the word ‘intrepid’ to describe our journey and ourselves as we cut a swathe through the middle of the outback on the handily positioned bitumen highways. We used ‘intrepid’ as if we were pioneering explorers and I guess in some way we were. Explorers synonymous with charting and opening up this wide brown land, such as Burke and Wills, Bass and Flinders, Blaxland and Wentworth, and M1 and A36, were too scared (read: not intrepid enough) to get about in a Piazza for their little jaunts. Driving into Coober Pedy is an interesting experience. The landscape, which is more like a moonscape, is littered with mounds of earth, the result of a nearly 100 years of prospecting for opals. Given its reputation Coober Pedy, an Aboriginal name literally meaning ‘white man’s hole in the ground’, is a surprisingly small town. Turning right off the highway, we drove slowly through the main street to discover that the town, like its surrounds, was tinged in red dust and locked in a losing battle trying to deflect the scorching sun.


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Tired from the driving and the constant heat, we drove past the signs spruiking underground opal shops and found a caravan park near the end of the main street. After we had checked the cabin’s television reception, we went back out onto the main road to take a look around for some food and beer. Now I’m not sure whether it was the crazy bestickered red car with the PIAZZA number plates or the rumours that we were travelling these parts without an Esky, but we got the distinct impression that the townsfolk of Coober Pedy are a suspicious bunch. More than anywhere we had been, we felt like we were being watched, spied on by men hiding in whatever shade they could find. However, we decided that their suspicion might be caused by decades of looking over one’s shoulder ensuring no one was trying to gain access to one’s opal plot. Opting not to confirm friends’ stories of confrontations with pushy opal sellers and deciding against visiting the Big Winch or the international hotel and shopping complex (actually if we had managed to find the latter we might have been very keen, but it wasn’t marked on the pie bag), and not wanting to test my fear of confined spaces, even if being underground might provide some relief from the intense heat, Joe and I instead decided to try and cool off with a swim. The caravan park’s idea of a pool was an interesting one. The circle-shaped bath was completely covered by a watertanktype construction save for a door. The first thing we noticed upon entering the enclosure was the number of kids in the water. There’s nothing more annoying than loud splashing kids when all you want to do is relax; however, on this occasion there wasn’t much splashing as the kids didn’t hang


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‘Piazza is fully imported, in limited numbers . . .’ 97

around in the pool long enough to create any. It wasn’t the sight of two dirty, smelly overweight blokes (one with hideously crusty feet) that scared them off though, it was the temperature of the water. On a day when outside the thermometer was nudging 40 degrees, people were unable to take a dip in the pool because it was so bloody cold! Joe and I could not fathom how the small pool managed to rival temperatures at a Tasmanian beach in winter, but it wasn’t long before we too were forced to remove our shivering bodies and head outside for the sunshine again. Our truncated swim seemed to have an impact on our appetites though. Actually, truth be told, the passing of any short amount of time usually made us hungry, so we went and took a look at our options. Under the cover of darkness it was difficult to tell just how many food establishments there were in Coober Pedy, but we could only find two. One was a Greek restaurant while the other was a Greek restaurant. In the end we decided upon Greek. Actually our meal of lamb and salad was probably just what was in order after weeks of the fast, fatty and often fermenting food found in some of the country’s finer roadhouses. In hindsight I look back on our Coober Pedy experience and think our assessment may have been a bit harsh, but at the time we were hot and bothered and sick of driving. At this point, I’m just going to interrupt to say that I vehemently disagree with the previous statement. If hell exists, I imagine it looks a lot like Coober Pedy.


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‘Your adrenalin really flows when you turn the ignition key.’

‘Your adrenalin really flows when you turn the ignition key.’

The drive from Coober Pedy into the Northern Territory to Uluru marked one of the longest of our trip: 731 kilometres of outback driving punctuated by massive amounts of road kill—not only kangaroos but also large numbers of cattle and other unidentifiable beasts. Admittedly, the scenery did yield occasional subtle changes, a bit more greenery here, some impressive rocky outcrops there. Still the resort complex at Yulara just short of Uluru was a very welcome sight. The sprawling facilities, ranging from five-star accommodation to the green campgrounds, were modern, clean and full of tourists. Normally one might hope that a cathartic dinky-di outback experience would provide a peaceful sanctuary for 98


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‘Your adrenalin really flows when you turn the ignition key.’ 99

some decent retrospection, but to be quite frank after long days of travelling Joe and I were looking forward to nothing more than an overpriced beer and a chance to flirt with some sexy English backpackers. Before we could indulge in a frosty beverage and uncomfortable silences with our UK cousins, we had to, as part of our pact to use every single thing that we brought with us, set up our tents for the first time on the trip. We eventually assembled them to resemble something similar to basic design principles and, with the shadows getting longer, decided it would be remiss to drive all of this way and not watch the sunset over the big red rock. A sunset at Uluru is an amazing experience. For those of you like Joe and I who had never before seen the rock, I can tell you it looks exactly like all the brochures suggest, the only difference is the size. I couldn’t believe how massive Uluru was in real life. Joe and I did a brisk lap around the ring road in Alyce just prior to the sunset, which led us to conclude that Uluru is probably even more beautiful from behind, where masses of craters and ridges are embedded in its surface. While Joe drove, I was being the ultimate tourist by taking as much blurry video camera footage as I could along with countless still photos. By the time we had returned to the sunset viewing section, the car park was overflowing with tourists from every imaginable nationality (except for those from really poor countries where they maintain a subsistence existence handploughing alluvial soil). As we jostled for position with our cameras at the ready, the sun slowly set and brought with it a kaleidoscope of hues, turning the rock from red to pink and


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eventually purple. With the sun finally down, we drove back towards Yulara. On the way I turned back for one last look and there, to my great excitement, I saw the moon rising over the left shoulder of the rock. The moonshine gave Uluru yet another dimension of immense beauty, and while I wasn’t the first bloke to ever see it, I’m bloody glad that I did. Back at the resort complex we hunted for a dinner venue. There was a choice of restaurants and cafes but we settled on the ‘choose your own cut of meat for the price of a small island then cook it yourself on the barbecue’ option in the open-air dining area complete with gigantic salad buffet, bar and stage for entertainment. After our superb meal and plentiful amounts of beer, we decided to do the sensible thing and head back to the campsite . . . but not before we bought some more beer to take with us. Back at the campground I noticed a car with Tasmanian number plates. As I hadn’t seen a single Tasmanian car since a rude lady in one refused to wave to us on the Nullarbor, I thought it would be polite to go over and have a bit of a chat with the owners. I kid you not: it took less than four minutes of exchanging questions before we established that the couple were the uncle and aunt of our mate Stu who had joined us at the football a month earlier! Such a Tassie thing, it’s only a small island after all. I left Stu’s relatives in peace and joined Joe in the campground shelter for another beverage. Before calling it a night and getting into our tents, we fired up the laptop to listen to our interview with Brett de Hoedt from the community radio station in Melbourne which he had now put online. I’m not sure if it was the countless beers we had


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drunk but we were pretty pleased with ourselves (and Brett’s editing) when we heard the interview. With community radio on board maybe we were approaching the next level of minor celebrity. Then, as one does when one is in the middle of the arid heart of our country, we checked our email, retired to our tents and soon fell asleep to the soothing sounds of German tourists getting wasted on cask wine. They say that sunrise at Uluru is spectacular. Well, Joe and I wouldn’t know. The beers ensured that we slept right through it, but we assume that it kind of looks like sunset only in reverse. Anzac Day dawned over Yulara. Chris and I, however, weren’t exactly doing it tough like the Diggers. We didn’t manage to get up early for the Dawn Service, nor did we manage to get up to see the sun rise over Uluru, but we did manage to be ready to leave at the internationally recognised check-out time of 10.00 a.m., which is pretty spectacular for us. Our next destination was Alice Springs, and the drive there was pretty uneventful: 200-plus kilometres in a straight line back over the same ground we’d travelled the previous day to the highway, and then a further 100 kilometres up the road to the completely misnamed Alice Springs. I was expecting it to be pretty hot in the dead centre of Australia, but this was beyond anything I’d imagined. The heat was making us both a bit cranky, and as the miles and miles of wide open spaces passed by outside the windows of our little red mobile sauna, I contemplated just how easy it would be to hide a body out in this part of the world. We finally made it to Alice Springs without any bloodshed and quickly cooled our dehydrated bodies and fraying tempers


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102 In Search of the Holden Piazza with a tasty electrolyte-replacing sports drink, while Chris made a few phone calls to get better directions to Mike’s place, our accommodation for the night. We had already rocked up to the wrong house and asked two little kids on bikes in the driveway if Michael lived there. ‘No, only my mummy, did you want me to get her?’ one of the kids helpfully replied. ‘Er, no thanks,’ Chris said, immediately recognising that, as Mike lacked offspring, we were in the wrong place. ‘Can you do a burn-out?’ asked the other kid as we reversed out of the driveway. Chris agreed to try and his answer was greeted with more enthusiasm than a female contestant on the now defunct ‘Price is Right’ hugging Larry Emdur. With his bloke-status on the line Chris had never felt more pressure to deliver, but, really, any Australian bloke can do a burn-out at the helm of a rear-wheel drive sports car, right? Wrong. To this day Chris claims Alyce’s dodgy clutch was to blame—either way, the disappointment on the kids’ faces could only be matched by that on Mr Warr’s shamed mug. Mike and Chris go back years, and within minutes of meeting him I felt like we did too. We talked absolute garbage over a few soothing ales before deciding that a quick dip and a few more beers at the local resort might be in order. The three of us piled into the back of the dodgiest-looking Datsun 120Y I’ve ever seen and went to pick up Mike’s flatmate, Chris, a tanned and rugged landscaper who looked as if he’d lived in the outback his entire life (but was in fact just another blow-in), and lurched our way towards the Alice Springs Resort. To avoid confusion,


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‘Your adrenalin really flows when you turn the ignition key.’ 103 between the two Chris’s, our new friend will henceforth be known as Russell. The four of us stumbled out of the cramped little Datsun and made our way to a table at the resort bar where a bunch of Mike’s friends had evidently settled in. Mike introduced us to Anika, his girlfriend, and friends Franka, Ingrid and Marilyn, and being all the way from the big smoke of Hobart we were soon the centre of attention. Unfortunately, we were unable to answer their questions about the car, where we were going, and what we’d done along the way (bugger all). Our new friends were as horrified as we imagine you are dear reader, that we’d been around our great land and somehow managed to bypass all the sights, and failed to take part in the vast array of ‘things you’ve got to do when travelling around Oz’. For a moment Chris and I actually thought that maybe we had indeed missed a few opportunities along the way, but looking back, we wouldn’t have changed a single thing. Cruising around the country with absolutely no idea what we were doing had worked so far. Besides, with only ten weeks or so to get around the place, we found that rather than having to be selective about what tourist stuff we did or didn’t do, the easiest way was to avoid it all together. Still, we regaled our drinking partners with anecdotes and reassured them (and ourselves) that we were having the time of our lives. This inspired the crew to contribute to the future best-seller by suggesting a few titles. ‘No Esky, No Idea, No Worries’ was a particular favourite. As the group disbanded, Chris, Russell, Mike and I returned to Mike’s to dine on pizza. The beers flowed and the guitars were cranked, and Chris and I discovered that we were the least


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104 In Search of the Holden Piazza talented among us. Now, my recollection of these events is a little hazy, but at some stage Russell magically transformed into Anika. I really don’t remember Russell leaving and Anika turning up, but before long the conversation had turned from beer, girls and guitars to the joys of libraries. Anika was a librarian and Chris and I found ourselves apologising that neither of us had visited any such institution in years. I had always been quite proud that I managed to make it through a university degree having only visited the library on three occasions, but after chatting to Anika and sharing a couple of ‘special cigarettes’ we soon realised that libraries are cool and librarians are your friends. That night I also realised that Parliamentary question time on telly is ‘like cool man’ and that I actually do like anchovies on my pizza, or perhaps I was more wasted than I thought possible. We awoke slowly the next day and eventually left Alice in Alyce. Our next stop on the long drive up the middle to Darwin was Tennant Creek, a mere 463 kilometres away. I have never let on to Joe about the misgivings I had about stopping in Tennant Creek. Tennant Creek was the site of one of Australia’s biggest ever earthquakes in 1988. I happen to hate earthquakes. I suspect this fear relates to a time when I was nine years old and was visiting my cousins in New Zealand. They lived in Edgecombe on the North Island which had experienced a major earthquake only months before our visit. The evidence remaining around town of the quake was alarming enough, but the fact my cousins thought it was hilarious to shake the caravan we were staying in whenever I was in it probably sowed the seeds for my tremor phobia. I actually thought that experiencing a strong earthquake when Joe and I were


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last in New Zealand for a ski trip would have cured my shaky fears, but as we entered Tennant Creek some doubts came creeping back. Still, being the brave guy I am, I tried to control my fears and managed to do so for the majority of our one-night stopover stay. To be honest, Tennant Creek itself is not an overly fabulouslooking place. In fact, as we made our way up the main street, we could see that both sides were punctuated with empty, boarded-up shops exuding minimal signs of commerce. All that was required was tumbleweed to blow past and a haunting Morricone soundtrack and we could have been in a ghost town scene straight out of a spaghetti western. We ordered some burgers from one of the few shops open for business and waited as the lady headed out the back to cook them. As we sat and surveyed the desolate scene outside, we were joined by the shop’s owner and a mangy dog. The old codger was obviously grateful for someone to have a yarn with and lamented the problems facing Tennant Creek and how things were different ‘back in the good old days’. The biggest issue, he noted, was that there was only a fraction of mining activity in the area compared with days gone by, and of those employed in the industry nearly all lived in Adelaide or Perth. Apparently, workers preferred to fly in to the mining compounds on a fortnightly basis rather than base themselves in town. As very few locals were gainfully employed by the mines, little money was flowing back into the local economy, hence the number of boarded-up premises that lined the streets. We left our new two- and four-legged friends and, armed with our ‘nutritious’ meals, headed back to Alyce. Something


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that was impossible to miss was the large proportion of Tennant Creek’s male Aboriginal population that dressed like US rapper 50 Cent, a phenomenon I surveyed as I got back into the car and slipped off my US-designed Chinese-made thongs to the sounds of Bruce Springsteen. The next day marked a fairly long drive to Katherine, nearly 650 kilometres, and after only a few hours I was feeling a little irritable. Still, thankfully the Australian Army was on hand to cheer me up. A convoy of trucks was headed towards Darwin, presumably undertaking some top-secret military exercise—either that or they had nothing to do and were just practising driving in an evenly spaced line of 50 or so trucks. I proffered the theory that the perfect 100-metre spacing between trucks meant that if they came under enemy fire or drove over a land mine, only one truck would be struck and not those following. Joe debunked this with an even more outrageous theory that they were spaced that way to allow people like us to overtake them more easily. Either way, it still took a good hour to pass them, with generous waving all round, then we had to pull over at a roadhouse to get petrol and while we stopped most of the trucks rumbled past us again. A few of the trucks decided to pull in to the roadhouse, adding to the collection of trucks that was already assembled there, and one of the army guys came up to us and asked excitedly if we were the guys driving around the country looking for Piazzas. Despite driving a Piazza with PIAZZA number plates and ‘www.piazzasearch.com’ stickers plastered all over it, Joe managed to confirm this fact with a straight face.


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‘I KNEW IT!’ the army guy exclaimed. ‘The others didn’t believe me.’ Apparently he had read of our quest in his local newspaper and had been on the two-way radio with other trucks in the convoy debating if we were actually who he thought we were. As he wandered off to give his fellow soldiers the big ‘I told you so’, Joe demonstrated our competence for such an automotive undertaking when the faulty petrol pump he was using failed to register that Alyce’s tank was full and spewed litres of the precious stuff all over the car, himself and the ground. Yep, we were the men for the job alright. As we cruised towards Katherine (in the midst of passing all of the army trucks for the second time), we were given a demonstration of our armed forces’ willingness to protect their fellow Australians. A truck carrying a large number of hay bales was engulfed in flames on the side of the road with a frantic crew of the Country Fire Service and assorted volunteers working together to extinguish the blaze and keep traffic moving through the area. The Army’s contribution was to park a large truck clearly marked ‘Danger! Explosives!’ just metres away from the inferno. Some narrow-thinking folk might see this as a little foolhardy, but it certainly stopped passing motorists slowing down to gawk at the burning wreckage. My tired and grumpy demeanour improved as we reached Katherine. The scenery had started to change; it had begun to look a little green and there was some water in the waterholes and rivers. I think seeing this greenery somehow re-energised me. The first difference I noticed between Tennant


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Creek and Katherine was that the shops in the main street were neither empty nor boarded up. A couple of kilometres from the centre of town lay the aptly named Shady Lane Caravan Park. Shady Lane was home to a magnificent, tropical-themed swimming pool complete with palm trees to provide shelter from the scorching sun. The pool was clean, modern and massive. The same could not be said of our accommodation. I am convinced that our tiny room with a bunk bed had been converted at some time from an old concrete-brick toilet block, without the benefit of retaining any of its previous conveniences. Instead we had to fight it out amongst the cane toads in the ablution facilities across the path. Come nightfall we headed back into town to pick up some provisions for the night in the form of beer and pizza. As Chris and I waited for our less than traditional bush tucker, we did some unanticipated celebrity spotting. ‘Australian Idol’ Casey Donovan was also in town and had decided that she too could go a pizza. After a bit of ‘that’s her’, ‘no it’s not’, I managed to convince Chris that we were indeed in the presence of pop royalty and waited for her to get off her phone so I could approach her for a chat. Maybe it’s because Tasmania has a shortage of fair dinkum celebrities, but Chris and I generally get pretty excited when in the presence of high profile people because, obviously, as famous people, they are better than the rest of us. We must have looked like demented fan types though, or maybe she copped a look at Chris’s feet, as Casey stayed on her phone and refused point blank to make eye contact with us. Still, I’m chalking the episode up as a claim to fame.


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The drive into Darwin was pleasantly short and very exciting. The visit got off to a cracking start with the woman serving at the petrol station recognising the car and letting us know that she had been following our trials and tribulations on local ABC radio. ABC radio in Darwin had been nothing short of exemplorary in assisting our national search for the mighty Piazza. Producer and host of the drive program Richard Margetson had called us when we were still in Port Augusta to ask if we would be interested in some of his program’s proposed ideas in relation to our search. As a result Richard ran a myriad Piazza-related items on his program throughout the week leading up to our arrival. ‘Piazza Week’, as it had been declared, included offering listeners the once in a lifetime opportunity to play the ‘Piazza Game’ which, from what we could tell, involved ringing in and telling their very own Piazza stories. The unprecedented media coverage was a lot of fun, but unfortunately did not produce a single Northern Territory Piazza for us to add to our list—though it did uncover someone who had bought one in New Zealand many years ago, another bloke who had written off one, and another who had actually attended the official launch in Adelaide in 1986. We drove into the heart of Darwin at around midday. While we weren’t sure of the exact temperature, the heat eclipsed even that of Alice Springs and Coober Pedy. It was the end of April and Darwin was entering the dry season, which thankfully was keeping the humidity at bay as the prevailing meteorological conditions were totally foreign to a couple of blokes from Hobart. The other thing that struck me about Darwin was how impressively modern the city appeared. I guess exposure to a world war and an unstoppable cyclone


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does have an impact on town planning. It was sad though to see that only a small portion of the city’s original infrastructure and architecture remains. Still, like all good cities, Darwin had built itself a mall and an obligatory food court, and that’s where we went to decide upon our next move. True to form we’d parked illegally just near the main mall and were horrified when we walked back to Alyce to see a slip of paper under her single windscreen wiper. Figuring that the parking inspectorate of Darwin had succeeded where their interstate counterparts had failed, I snatched the ticket to inspect the damage. Rather than an expensive parking fine though, it turned out to be a message of support from a former Tasmanian living in Darwin who had heard about us on the local radio. We’d dodged another bullet. We decided to break with tradition and forego caravan park accommodation during our time in Darwin, and, in the absence of a friend to stay with, would for the first time on the trip enter the questionable world that is scummy backpacking hostel accommodation. Well, it would have been scummy had we not managed to find the finest hostel in Darwin, nay the world. Located on Mitchell Street, which is lined with an array of pubs, hostels and tour businesses, our modestly priced accommodation was the epitome of fun. Sure, we had to share with three other smelly backpackers in a small room lacking airconditioning and luxury, but it was worth it because of the hostel’s irresistible amenities. Two sensational roof-top saltwater swimming pools (complete with menacing fibreglass crocodile), a waterfall cascading into a rock spa, a massive television screen and booming sound system and an impressively stocked pool-side bar with


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even more impressive prices meant that Joe and I would be unable not to have fun. With no Piazzas to chase we could sit back and relax without a care in the world, to seriously unwind from the endless hours of driving. If there was a downside to our amenable surroundings it would be the extent to which we did unwind. Unlike the caravan parks we had been staying at, which were to a large extent populated by some of Australia’s finest golden oldies, the backpacker hostel was filled to the brim with some of Europe’s finest young folk. Though, unfortunately for us, for every drop-dead-gorgeous bikini-clad girl there was an equally impressive perfectly chiselled bloke. In some ways I was looking forward to getting back out into the caravan parks because I wasn’t sure how long I could continue to walk around sucking in my stomach while at the same time attempting to hide my weeping, crusty feet. As the sparkling afternoon quickly turned into evening, Joe and I, just as quickly, turned into drunken tourists and, having spruced ourselves up accordingly by changing into our best shorts (i.e. the clean ones), decided to hit the town. This simply meant going across the road to a busy-looking Shenanigans pub. I shuddered when I thought back to the similarly named establishment in Adelaide. This one appeared to be populated by an inordinately large number of welldeveloped school kids. Then it dawned on us—after reading the rather large sign by the door—tonight was ‘Schoolies Night’. A hush fell over the crowd as Britney Spears’s ‘Baby Hit Me One More Time’ began cranking out of the jukebox. Tables where only moments before people had been sitting and chatting sensibly over a drink transformed into small


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stages where ‘staff’ dressed in tiny school dresses danced seductively. Joe and I exchanged incredibly insightful critiques of each dancer’s abilities, then after more songs and more dancing the DJ put out the call for patrons to get up on the tables and strut their stuff in competition for just what everyone in the room needed: more drink vouchers. Obviously not used to the Darwin heat, Joe had been drinking like a man possessed and, while I wasn’t drinking all that slowly, he had managed to pull a couple of quick ‘laps’ on me—no mean feat when downing pints. Try as I might though, I failed to convince my now well-lubricated co-driver to get up and show us all just what moves he was packing. Perhaps he had a moment of clarity, I’m not sure, but if he did it would be the only one he would have for the remainder of the night. When the dancing was finally over, Joe headed off to the gents while I managed to strike up a conversation with a couple of locals. The girl I spoke to most was an occupational therapist. Once I had exhausted my extensive knowledge of her chosen profession—‘So do you think I need a new mouse pad at work, I’ve only got a blue one?’—Joe returned looking decidedly different from when I had last seen him. He was sporting a different t-shirt. ‘I’m back,’ he slurred. ‘From where?’ was my obvious response. ‘From the hostel thingy.’ ‘Why were you there and why have you changed your top?’ I asked, expecting him to detail an unfortunate incident involving the uninvited return of his evening meal.


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‘Apparently I got kicked out for being too drunk,’ he offered in a barely intelligible and slightly wounded tone. Joe, being the smart bloke he is, had run across the road, changed tops and waltzed straight back in the door past the bouncers who had just removed him. I guess if Superman can hide his identity by putting on a pair of glasses there was no reason why Joe couldn’t fool the bouncers with a quick change of apparel. What happened next is a little hazy but, in summary, consisted of Joe and I drinking far too much, Joe going missing again and me attempting to delve deep into my mind for any skerrick of information that could be converted into a sentence about occupational therapy. Eventually, after taking about an hour to explain in slurred words to my new friend just what the hell Joe and I were doing driving around the country, I decided to pull up stumps and head to bed, but not before I took a quick detour to the local 24-hour dodgy food stop (every town has one—Hobart’s is called Mykynos, subtitled ‘The Food of Paradice’—I don’t know what or where Paradice is but I certainly like its food at three o’clock in the morning). Unfortunately I can’t recall what the Darwin equivalent is named but intelligently I received some rudimentary instructions before I set off on foot for my very early morning meal. Apparently all I had to do was walk out of Shenanigans, turn left, walk two blocks, turn right for a block then turn left for a block then turn right and cross the road and I would be there. I was about halfway there when I thought that perhaps it would be best to turn back, go to sleep and get my grease in the morning.


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It was around the time I changed my mind for the fourth time and decided that since I had made it this far I would keep going that I stubbed my big toe on the concrete footpath, having failed to negotiate the difficult task of putting one thong in front of the other. My extremely inelegant big toe nail took the full brunt of the stubbing, half of it broke off and blood began pouring from my left extremity. As I soldiered on I couldn’t help but let out a small laugh in acknowledgement of just what a state my crusty feet were now in. After ordering a ridiculous amount of unhealthy food that I would never consume in its entirety, I stepped outside and contemplated the walk home, quickly coming to the conclusion that a taxi would be my best option. In line with my concise decision-making I set about hailing a taxi. There I was, swaying and struggling with an armful of food in the middle of a roundabout, waving my free arm furiously while my big toe continued to bleed. A cab with its roof lights on drove straight past me. So in this part of the world ‘lights on’ means they’re busy with a job, I figured (you know how they seem to differ for each state). The next cab that came along had lights off but it too drove straight on. Right, I thought, that seems a little odd. But to confuse me even more the third cab that drove by and ignored me had one light on and one light off. As more cabs drove by I began to consider the possibility that it actually had something to do with me. Maybe, just maybe, they didn’t want a large drunken male with enough food to feed a third-world country dripping blood all over their floor mats. After what seemed like an eternity a taxi finally stopped to pick me up. It was no doubt a decision the driver soon


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regretted as not only did he have to spend the entire trip listening to me ask him stupid questions about taxis and what their roof-top lights meant, the trip only lasted for about 24 seconds. Seems I hadn’t really walked all that far after all. I can’t remember how much I paid or tipped him but I hope it was a lot. I had never felt so crook in my life. I was covered in sweat when I awoke in an empty room at the backpackers hostel figuring hazily that Chris had fared a little better than I and that he must have gone for our scheduled early morning swim. Being stuck to a vinyl mattress is not the most pleasant experience in the world, so I plugged in my phone to charge (it had died the previous evening but I was too drunk to care) and trudged out to immerse myself in the soothing waters of the pool. Strangely, no sign of Chris out there either. Then a startling thought occurred to me: Chris had been chatting to a couple of lovely girls during the evening and . . . well, you can guess what I was thinking as I lay in the shallow end of the pool, unable to do anything else. After a few hours I finally decided it was time to grab my phone and track down the mysterious lad. But I didn’t need to make the call as he was walking up the stairs just as I was arriving back at the room. Chris grunted monosyllabically and as we walked into our room, he thrust a spew-covered pair of shorts under my nose with two instructions: ‘Wash these, and don’t worry about that SMS I sent you.’ I picked up my charged phone and read the most vitriolic text message I’d ever received. In order to keep this G-rated, I’ll pick out the words that are fit for publication: idiot, hate you Kremzer, hotel across the road, not impressed.


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116 In Search of the Holden Piazza Turns out that as I had somehow vomited on his shorts, which were sitting on his bed, Chris had decided to seek accommodation at a hotel across the road. The rest of the day was spent apologising to Chris and heading out on regular missions up the road in search of non-alcoholic beverages. Other than that we did as little as possible so that we wouldn’t disturb the band of African percussionists who had taken up residence in our respective heads. The only strenuous movement I made that day was to reach for my mobile phone and ring directory assistance in order to find the closest fried chicken outlet in Darwin. ‘What!’ I was incredulous. ‘Not a single outlet in the city?’ Apparently fast-food establishments are found in Darwin’s outer suburbs while the city itself is miserably devoid of such luxuries. After a short swim I attempted to walk down the street to find sustenance in the form of bakery products and an electrolyte-replacing sports drink. The intense heat coupled with my accompanying headache certainly made it a tough assignment, but I eventually returned to find Joe in a deteriorating state of unwell. He took one look at the temperate offerings of pizza bread and sausage rolls and promptly went back to bed. I had seen Joe drunk countless times before but the previous night had certainly reached another level—well, actually there was the night he tried to open the front door of my house, where he didn’t live, with the keys to his 1979 Ford Escort, but that’s another story . . . I couldn’t stay mad at Joe for too long, because in truth I had done a similar thing on our skiing trip in New Zealand. We’d left the slopes one afternoon to take up residence at a pub . . . and stayed there. I’m not really sure why I drank so


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much that evening, but I suspect it may have had something to do with calming my nerves after the earthquake the night before. By the time we got home I was positive that we were experiencing aftershocks, well, the kind that make the room spin furiously when one is lying on one’s bed anyway. I tried to get to the bathroom in time, I really did. But all I managed to do was to lean over and vomit on the floor beside the bed. I tried to clean it up as best I could, I really did. But all I managed to do was remove the chunks and smear the remainder. The next morning I stated the obvious to Joe—that the place stank, especially with the heater cranked to the max to keep the Queenstown cold at bay. I felt terrible at the thought of someone having to clean it up, but, as he was impatiently attaching the skis to the roof of the car, Joe assured me, ‘The cleaners deal with this stuff all the time, let’s go.’ When we got back to the motel that evening, the room smelt great and there wasn’t a sign of my generous deposit. We were mightily impressed with the clean-up and I was happy that the little episode was behind me. Then the phone rang. Joe and I looked at each other. I answered it sheepishly. It was Diane, from reception, ringing to say that the cleaners weren’t too happy with my ‘little accident’ and so the motel was adding a clean-up fee of $50 to our account. When it came time to check out at the end of our stay, I was presented with the computer-generated invoice which to my absolute horror (and secret pleasure) included an item entitled ‘Miscellaneous—Spewed in Room—$50.00’. My immense embarrassment was countered somewhat by the young girl behind reception.


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‘Aw, don’t worry about it, I spew all the time,’ she said. There’s a lesson in all this for young players—if you are going to drink to excess in New Zealand, watch out for the spew tax, it’s not cheap. Anyway, I have digressed; back to Darwin. By late afternoon we were nearly talking to each other again and decided that we should do something that we had put off since we parked at the hostel—get the bloody car going again. Alyce was having some serious gear-changing troubles, and I don’t mean like the real Alyce hurriedly having to change chiffon frocks between episode tapings. We again topped up Alyce’s clutch-fluid reservoir and waited impatiently until we were able to push the clutch pedal in and change gears. When this eventually happened we got in and took a short drive around the city and down into the harbour and dock areas. Despite our lingering headaches, in the brilliant sunshine Darwin was still a beautiful place; it’s really a shame that swimming is rendered impossible by the presence of saltwater crocodiles. No doubt after a few too many at Shenanigans, the odd tourist has been known to ignore the warnings, but, luckily, as Joe and I were barely able to walk the previous night, let alone swim, there was no real temptation for us. With our truncated sightseeing adventure complete we returned to one of the hostel pools and decided to stay put for the rest of the night . . . and take advantage of the happy hour prices. We managed to knock back two beers each in a little over four hours. I think the first may actually have contained small fragments of glass and the odd rusty razor blade although the second was considerably more refreshing.


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We briefly toyed with the idea of ‘just one more’ before banishing the thought and returning to our room where the faint aroma of secondhand Chinese takeaway still lingered. We took one last dip the next morning before hitting the road once again. We would have loved to stay around Darwin for longer and done the drunken backpacker thing some more, but we were really pressed for time. During our stay in the city we each had managed to make a couple of phone calls to our respective workplaces and neither was all that receptive to the idea of giving us even more time off, and while we didn’t canvas the issue with them I suspect our credit card companies would have had similar sentiments. So we headed off, comforted in the knowledge that we had plenty of Piazzas yet to see in Queensland and beyond.


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‘Piazza—an overpriced understatement.’

‘Piazza—an overpriced understatement.’

Mataranka, a homestead about an hour south of Katherine, was just the antidote for the punishment that Darwin had dished out. After we arrived, the most gruelling thing we had to do was sit, soak and detox in the thermal springs just a few minutes’ walk from the camping ground. With the birds flapping about overhead and kangaroos bounding around the place, nothing could have been more serene, that is, until the tour bus arrived. All of a sudden our secluded paradise was filled with the disruptive tones of cockney accents and rapidly spoken German. Although our experience in other parts of the country indicated that this was not necessarily a bad thing, especially in a poolside setting filled with young female backpackers, our worst fears were confirmed when through the trees strolled our enemies 120


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‘Piazza—an overpriced understatement.’ 121 from earlier in the journey—the dreaded grey nomads. This, however, was a strange subspecies that didn’t travel about in Winnebago vans or Toyota Camrys with caravans attached; these grey nomads invaded en masse in a luxury coach. Not only was the peace and tranquillity of our surrounds instantly shattered, but the scenery took a bit of a beating too. It was about this time that we decided to leave the soothing mineral spring and go in search of beer and TV. So we headed up to the homestead to grab a pie, watch the footy and have a quick beverage and game of pool, maintaining the slowest pace possible. Before dinner we called our respective girlfriends, which wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Being pretty much in the middle of nowhere, Mataranka was one of the few places on our trip where we had absolutely no mobile phone coverage, and we had already pumped most of our coins into the pool table. However, our dilemma did keep the phone calls short—where we were, what we hadn’t been up to and how we were planning a quiet night. Chris and I believed it at the time, but I’m pretty sure Danni was a bit sceptical when music started blasting out from somewhere near the bar. We soon discovered that Mataranka has a live music scene. It was a pleasant surprise and over dinner we were entertained by a bedazzled duo cranking out country tracks. As the night wore on and our bar tab mounted, the music moved ever so gradually from country to classic ‘pub rock’ while Chris and I moved less gradually toward a drunken state. I know that showing an appreciation for the Angels, Gary Moore and the like is frowned upon, so I usually keep it pretty quiet, but by the time the guitarist started cranking Cool World, I was in full voice,


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122 In Search of the Holden Piazza occasionally thrusting my air mike into Chris’s face in anticipation of his sweet harmonies. Evidently Chris is not a Mondo Rock fan, but in any case the roles were reversed when the Crowded House medley started so I didn’t feel too bad. By the time the rock and roll set finished and the singer came off stage, Chris and I were his biggest fans. Bern (as we soon discovered his name to be) repaid the compliment by drinking with Chris, myself, and a couple of locals until the wee small hours. So much for our quiet night. It was a bit frustrating to be going back over the same ground we’d covered less than a week earlier, but in order to stick to those roads we knew Alyce was capable of handling it was necessary for us to backtrack as far as Tennant Creek before heading east towards the Pacific’s sparkling waters. It was a strange feeling in the car that day as normally we drive towards new places, unsure of exactly what to expect. On this occasion however, the two of us knew exactly what to expect. Still, surely a second night in Tennant Creek couldn’t be as bad as a 10-minute stay in Coober Pedy. Too relaxed to care about where we would be staying that night I almost dozed off, only to be rudely awakened by Joe backing into a large rock while pulling over for a scheduled driver change. The serenity of Mataranka had well and truly taken hold as I only felt the need to hurl mild abuse at him. An inspection later showed that even this may have been unwarranted, but it’s always good to keep him on his toes. On the way back to Tennant Creek we did notice one thing of interest, something we’d somehow missed on our way north. Every town we passed seemed to have been the recipient of multiple Keep Australia Beautiful ‘Tidy Town’


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‘Piazza—an overpriced understatement.’ 123

awards. From what we could gather, roughly seven different NT towns won the award in 1996. We briefly contemplated writing a letter to Ian Kiernan to see if he was aware of this anomaly, but decided that most of these one-horse towns had very little else going for them so we’d let them hang on to their misgotten glory. As our maiden visit to Tennant Creek had been none too eventful, not even an earthquake, it was only out of necessity that we returned to this wreck of a town. Actually, Tennant Creek is literally a wreck. As legend has it, the town was settled when a beer truck en route to Darwin crashed, spilling its precious cargo. Rather than let good beer go to waste, a number of passers-by decided to help salvage what they could, and ended up settling in, in much the same way Chris and I ‘settle in’ unconscious and drooling after a big night. With a history like that, we found it hard to believe what a drab, uninteresting place it had become. However, when we arrived, Tennant Creek had somehow transformed into a different town. Cars lined the streets and people were running about everywhere. Had the public of Tennant Creek and surrounding areas finally got into the Piazza Search spirit? Of course not. It was the Tennant Creek May Muster, or so the sign said. Our initial thoughts of whooping it up at the hoe-down and drinking Bundy jugs with ute-driving Territorians were followed by a more sobering realisation—where the hell were we going to stay? The place was chockers! Although we weren’t too hopeful, we decided to check out the caravan park where we’d stayed a week or so earlier. Once again our tried and true philosophy of doing everything in a completely disorganised and half-arsed manner came through


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124 In Search of the Holden Piazza for us. There was one vacant cabin, only because the couple who had booked it for the weekend had decided that one night of the May Muster was enough. And they’d paid for the weekend in advance, so we got it half price. Bonus. Once we’d booked in, another terrible thought hit us. It was Logies night! There was no way we could possibly join the muster festivities when the crème de la crème of Australian television talent was being recognised for its achievements. Fortunately for us, we discovered that we could experience the best of both worlds, as the drag-racing, one of the highlights of the annual muster and the event we were interested in, would be finished by the time the stars hit the red carpet. Chris actually took a bit of coaxing to agree to this, such is his dedication to ‘Home and Away’ and ‘Neighbours’, but I knew we had a duty to be there. Having taken virtually no part in the local cultures that Chris and I had so far been (potentially) exposed to, an afternoon of drag-racing in Tennant Creek seemed like exactly the sort of stuff that would bring a smile to our increasingly agitated publisher’s face. I finally managed to convince Chris on the pretence that, if we were ever going to find someone who could fix Alyce’s misbehaving clutch on the cheap, ‘the drags’ would be the place to do it. In hindsight we should have stuck with our usual MO. After all, sitting on our arses watching telly and drinking beer had worked for us so far. The first problem we encountered was that, although the airstrip where the drags were occurring was pretty much across the road from our caravan park, we decided to take Alyce along, you know, as a bit of a conversation starter, and in case we found someone to fix her clutch, and also because we’re dead lazy. Anyway, whatever our reason, Alyce’s dodgy clutch


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‘Piazza—an overpriced understatement.’ 125 decided that this would be a great time to play up. So there we were, driving across a dusty corrugated paddock at about 15 km/h stuck in third gear. A great look when cruising through a crowd of drunken petrol heads. However, Chris and I remained optimistic and figured that if we got someone to fix her clutch it would be worth the effort. Also, it takes a lot more than people staring at our bad driving to embarrass us. The second problem was that neither Chris nor I had bothered to check the contents of our wallets. So when we eventually pulled up at the gate near the airstrip in our dusty, very crooksounding vehicle, we were promptly forced to turn around as we couldn’t afford the entry fee. I don’t mind admitting that now we were starting to feel a little embarrassed. As Alyce limped back across the dusty paddock, we heard, over the noise of our labouring engine, an announcement which cheered us immensely: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, (funny, I didn’t see too many of either hanging around) we’re going to have to stop the drags as the Royal Flying Doctor Service needs to use the airstrip.’ Victor Charlie Charlie to Mike Sierra Foxtrot, we’d just saved ourselves a lot of trouble and $10 each (very important at this stage of the game as my funds were starting to dwindle due to the exorbitant JBPPI of some places). Although we’d missed out on the biggest event in town (I wonder how Alyce would go over the quarter mile), and the chance to get the clutch fixed, the magic of the muster was not lost on us completely. As we sat down with our pizzas to watch the spectacle that was Logies 2005, the soundtrack to the glitz and glamour from Crown Casino was provided by the muster


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126 In Search of the Holden Piazza black-tie ball. As the stunning Natalie Blair stepped up to accept her gong, the strains of ZZ Top’s ‘Legs’ could be heard wafting across the footy oval adjacent to our cabin. Elder statesman of Logies’ disappointments, John Wood, stepped up to receive some sort of thanks-for-coming award to the sounds of a slightly countrified version of ‘Knock on Wood’ and, oddly enough, when our mate and Piazza Search supporter Pete Hellier was saying a few words in response to ‘Rove Live’ winning the Logie in the category for ‘Best Chat Show Hosted by a Midget with Selfconfessed Bladder Control Issues’ or some such, the muster band was whipping the crowd into a frenzy with the Nutbush. I don’t know what, if anything, this signifies. As the Logie winners partied on in a blizzard of cocaine (allegedly, of course) and the townspeople of Tennant Creek danced up a dust storm with bellies full of Bundy, Chris and I decided it might be time to call it quits and get ready for the following day’s big drive to Mt Isa. When we awoke after a huge night of Logies excitement, it was time for us to head east, turn off the Stuart Highway linking Alice Springs and Darwin and onto the Barkly Highway which stretches towards the east coast of Queensland. We were a little worried however, as this leg of the journey consisted of the longest stretch of highway without a service station, around 450 kilometres, which was sure to test Alyce’s fuel range. I’d say we made it about 440 of them before we were forced to pull over to the side of the road to refill Alyce with the provisions we had in the boot. The jerry can held about 20 litres of petrol and it took ten slow minutes to empty it into the car’s tank. Such was the heat I was expecting the petrol to ignite at any moment—I know there’s not much


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scientific basis to that comment but that was definitely how it felt. The sound of the petrol running into the tank seemed to have some effect on my primordial brain because I then felt the urge to take a leak. As I stood relieving myself by the side of the road surveying the endless paddock stretching away from me, I suddenly felt overcome with sadness, a sadness for generations of farmers forced to work in such unforgiving conditions. Then, just as I was considering donating half of my future earnings to Farm Aid, a fly landed on my penis. I quickly snapped out of my sympathetic thoughts for the struggling farmers—they can have their sun-parched paddocks and keep their bloody flies to themselves! As you might have guessed by now, it was stinking hot again. Despite the fact that almost every day on our trip was stinking hot, so take that as a given, this particular day was really giving me the shits. Though my mood lightened somewhat when we saw a dingo slinking about by the side of the highway. The poor thing looked even more miserable than I was, although its woes seemed to be more from the lack of a good dinner in recent times (something Chris and I were certainly not suffering from, as anyone who’d seen us shirtless of late could attest to) than from the heat. The poor little fella was skin and bone and if we’d had a spare baby in the boot I would have fed it to him in a flash . . . Not long after this a feral cat the size of Phar Lap ran out on to the road. Chris made absolutely no effort to hit it (I don’t care how big it was, a cat’s a cat and I hate cats), and then informed me that he hadn’t even seen it. It was pretty tough to miss so I decided from that point onwards to be a little more


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128 In Search of the Holden Piazza vigilant in the passenger seat, especially as the signs scattered along the roadside informed us that we were in ‘buffaroo’ country. A buffaroo is, so the locals told us, what happens when buffalos and kangaroos go out, have a few drinks, and one thing leads to another. Apparently Camooweel on the Northern Territory–Queensland border is teeming with them. Although we didn’t see any when we stopped for a bit of lunch there—which is lucky because a pair of horns on a seven-foot boomer would have put a pretty big hole in Alyce’s intercooler if Warr had had another of his little micro-kips. We’d noticed by this time that just about all the small towns we passed through on our search had some sort of gimmick to set them apart from all the other small towns and hopefully entice travellers to stop and pump a few dollars into the local economy. We’d already been through Australia’s Skylab capital, seen the Big Galah and various other kooky ideas too lame to mention. Camooweal had opted to put itself on the map by erecting a statue of an imaginary animal. As bizarre as this seemed at least it was more original than claiming to be a Tidy Town award winner. We made it through to Mt Isa without further incident. Thankfully Chris did manage to see the herd of very large cows crossing the road as we snaked through the hills towards civilisation (of sorts), and even managed to stop, eventually. He swears that he was fully aware of the 6 tonnes of prime beef between us and our intended destination when I yelled out ‘Bovine!!!’, but I’m certain he was looking out the window at the increasingly green and mountainous terrain. It was easy to get a bit distracted though, because Mt Isa, while no waterpark, was


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‘Piazza—an overpriced understatement.’ 129 certainly a lot more lush than the desert we’d been driving through for the past few weeks. The usual routine of settling in to a caravan park with beers and TV took place, but a little more quietly that night. Having been in a bad mood in the morning from the oppressive heat, I was in a worse mood in the evening as I decided it was finally time to bite the bullet and call up my parents to borrow some cash. Since I started working in the public service all those years ago, my parents have been on my back to buy a house. Early on, before prices went mental, it might have been a possibility, but like any irresponsible young man with a disposable income, I had better things to spend my money on—clothes (believe it or not, I was quite the metrosexual), holidays, CDs, and, of course, copious amounts of booze-driven partying. Understandably, my parents thought that the Piazza Search was an enormous waste of money which should be going into bricks and mortar, so I knew I was in for a lecture when I rang to ask for a hand-out. Fortunately, however, my parents had realised the importance of the quest and at the end of a brief conversation (brief because they’d opened one of my recent phone bills) a suitable arrangement was made, along with a promise that when this was all over I’d get my act together. I rested a bit easier that night knowing that I wouldn’t have to dance like a monkey for food during the remaining weeks of our journey. It’s true we’d settled on a quiet night in, but it wasn’t as if there were no other options available to us. When we were checking in, the manager at reception informed us of their wonderful shuttle bus service. All we needed to do was let them know that we wanted the bus and it would be there


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within five minutes to take us straight, no stops along the way, to the local club where we could purchase a fabulously priced meal of curried sausages and play the pokies to our heart’s content. Tempting as it was, we decided to stay in. We awoke the following morning with only three weeks to go! Given that we still hadn’t reached the East Coast, we knew we’d have to crank up the pace to get back to Melbourne in time to hop on a ferry to Hobart and be back at work when our leave ran out. The days of staying in one town for a week, drinking in the sun and carrying on as if we had all the time in the world were over. Had we not been so serious about our quest Chris and I could have headed straight for Brisbane as soon as we hit the coast. It was sure to be a hot bed of activity for oddlooking sports coupes, but having received reports of a Piazza getting about in Cairns, we knew it was our duty to head north and track down this tropical tarmac terrier. We left a fairly uninspiring Mt Isa for Hughenden—the home of the world famous Muttaburrasaurus—a lazy 514 kilometres away. Joe and I had settled on Hughenden for that night’s bed because the next major centre, Charters Towers, was a further 243 kilometres and we just didn’t think that Alyce would be up for such a drive . . . a reasonably prophetic sentiment as it transpires. Her clutch was hanging on for dear life and matters were made worse when I went to overtake a truck and Alyce’s usually nimble 2-litre turbo engine suddenly lost power, allowing us to complete the overtaking manoeuvre with only metres to spare in the face of oncoming traffic. Alyce’s declining health was increasingly worrying. We pulled over to the side of the road and lifted up the bonnet.


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Once again we were greeted by bits of metal and pipes that we knew nothing about. We did notice though that oil had spat out all over the engine bay and, deciding that this couldn’t be a good sign, immediately topped up the oil (and clutch fluid, of course) in the hope that the engine wasn’t haemorrhaging anywhere. Then we let the poor lady rest by the side of the road for a while. I could not believe how bloody hot it was. You would think that we would be getting used to it by now after driving up the interior to Darwin, but under the midday sun and with Alyce’s engine scorching like a furnace it felt like the depths of Hades. Looking up and down the isolated Flinders Highway, surrounded by brown tracts of pasture, I tried to take stock of the situation calmly and rationally. ‘I DON’T WANT TO DIE OUT HERE!’ I screamed at Joe with the Burke and Wills memorial we had passed only an hour earlier still etched into mind. Fortunately for my encroaching hysteria, Joe pointed out in a measured and quiet voice that we had a few other things to consider first. We then debated what our options were. If there wasn’t sufficient oil in the engine, continuing to drive further could cause damage severe enough to end our trip altogether. We could call roadside assistance but, depending on where the local branch was, it could take some hours to be reached and we didn’t want to hang around in the sun (note: we had neglected to bring with us the obligatory tarpaulin to erect as a shade canopy off the side of the car in situations like these. Oh, and I DIDN’T WANT TO DIE OUT HERE!). We could flag down a road train for assistance but both Joe and I had watched too many early 1990s ‘60 Minutes’


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specials on roadside serial killer Ivan Milat. Mind you, for anyone who’s seen Wolf Creek, who’s laughing now? We eventually decided to see if we could nurse Alyce into the nearest town and seek expert mechanical advice. Looking at our map (not the one on the pie packet, the other one), we figured all we had to do was reach Julia Creek, a mere 48 kilometres away. Alyce seemed to be travelling okay now but we weren’t pushing her hard. As we drove towards Julia Creek (or Jesus Christ, James Cook etc) we noticed the township was home to its own airport. Joe and I wondered how often planes to Hobart ran. We began speculating that if Alyce’s trouble was terminal then we might have to pay a visit to a terminal of another kind—but we needed to get someone to look over the old girl first. Our road atlas told us that Julia Creek was home to a population of 519. Luckily for us, two of those people decided to own and run mechanical workshops. Also lucky was the fact that they were easy to spot on the main road. We tried our luck at the first workshop and pulled into the gravel car park. We were confident that we would be able to sort something out as this particular place of business proudly displayed the ‘RACQ Approved Repairer’ logo. Under the terms of our nationally recognised roadside assistance policy, we would be able to demand a free inspection. After politely waiting for some time to be noticed, we ventured inside the workshop to find a mechanic under a Landcruiser. The greasecovered overall-wearing bloke in his early thirties walked out into the piercing sunshine to take a look at Alyce. He had never seen a Piazza before and the way in which he eyed the overflowing, over-engineered engine made me think


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that he was praying he would never have to work on one either. So, could he diagnose Alyce’s problems? No, he couldn’t. Would he give it a shot? Cagily the mechanic informed us that he wouldn’t be able to take a look at her until tomorrow and maybe not even until the next day. I’m sure if we’d turned up in an ailing four-wheel drive or ancient Kingswood, he could have sorted out any issues in ten minutes flat, but when it came to 1986 Japanese turbo-charged technology he wasn’t going to touch it with a barge pole. Apparently, the other mechanic that usually worked there was otherwise occupied recuperating from a major operation in hospital so this bloke was left to work on all the ‘Cruisers’. Joe and I glanced back inside the workshop to see six Toyota Landcruisers lined up ready for attention. We soldiered on down the road to the next mechanic where we were greeted with a similar story, except with an emphasis on Toyota Hiluxes. Deflated, Joe and I looked for some shade and a cold bottle of water. We surveyed the main street and decided that we didn’t really want to hang around for the next weekend’s ‘Julia Creek Dirt and Dust Triathlon’ and so agreed to handle Alyce with care and push on to Hughenden after all, a further 259 kilometres, but punctuated by a number of smaller outposts along the way. We stocked up on petrol, oil and clutch fluid and tentatively took to the road again. We were happy to reach the small town of Richmond, situated about halfway between Julia Creek and Hughenden. With no further signs of engine problems, we took the opportunity to stop, relax and take in all Richmond had to offer . . . which for us was a surprisingly half-decent hamburger


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from the roadhouse. But with no mechanic in sight we were soon back on the Flinders Highway again and, with fingers and rotting toes crossed, we made it to the home of the Muttaburrasaurus. While we were 97.5 million years too late to see Australia’s great offering to the dinosaur world in action, we were fortunate enough to see the seven-metre replica in the main street. By the time we realised we’d done 500 kilometres with no further problems and no unusual oil consumption, we figured that our tried and true philosophy of doing absolutely nothing had come up trumps once again. We tracked down a local caravan park, seeking rest for our weary car and bodies after such a mentally exhausting day. Unfortunately, the park manager informed us, there were no cabins or caravans remaining to hire for the night. Joe and I silently wondered whether it was school holidays or the annual Muttaburrasaurus convention which had led to the unprecedented demand. However, the manager was able to offer us some boarding house-style accommodation at the back of the park. The two wings of the accommodation building looked like they were once used as a rural hospital facility, but I figured they were more likely to have been used as a shearers quarters or the like. I quickly changed my mind when I spied the adjustable steel hospital beds in our room. The accommodation was very basic, but came at a bargain-basement price and, given our dwindling funds, that could only be a good thing. What we saved on accommodation we were able to spend on beer and Chinese food. We shared the building with an older couple and some builders from Charters Towers who


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were in Hughenden fulfilling public housing renovation contracts. The older couple prepared a basic meal of bread and vegetables for themselves, while the builders opted for steak and mashed potatoes. Obviously you really need to know that. I’m not sure what the burly tanned builders thought of us when we politely asked if we could change channels to watch ‘Home and Away’. Normally we wouldn’t have considered such a thing but that night we were about to find out who the Summer Bay stalker was, a storyline which had had Joe and I in thrall for the past couple of months. For the record, it was Zoe; I was right.


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‘The driver is confronted by no fewer than 20 warning and function lights, all of them easy to interpret.’

‘The driver is confronted by no fewer than 20 warning . . .’

As we awoke in Hughenden, the excitement was palpable. If our chariot held together, which was certainly not a given, we’d be on the east coast of the country by the end of the day. We set off with renewed enthusiasm towards the inviting blue waters of the Pacific. The scenery around us quickly changed from dry, arid dust to lush, sub-tropical greenery. Although this certainly gave the appearance of comfortable sunshine, humidity was something we had not faced since Darwin, and as we made our way towards Townsville, we were dripping with sweat. But despite the

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‘The driver is confronted by no fewer than 20 warning . . .’ 137 suffocating humidity, and the way it seemed to accentuate Chris’s nauseating feet, we also felt relieved because tomorrow we’d be hitting the geographical top of our journey, Cairns, and it was all downhill from there. On the way to Townsville we drove through Charters Towers, home of course to the spiritual patron of our quest, the ‘Butcher from Charters Towers’, Cary Young. Joe and I had spent days deciding how we should mark this auspicious occasion. We had ideas of interviewing the town mayor and asking him when an appropriate monument would be erected in honour of the town’s most famous son. We were also planning to conduct ‘vox pop’ interviews on the street with locals to talk about the great man. Unable to agree on a suitable form of homage we subtly yet suitably marked our arrival to Charters Towers with a kebab and a visit to the local music store. Throughout the quest, we’d been making a beeline for the music store whenever a town was big enough to have one. While we had about 50 CDs to keep us company on our journey, we’d been through each of them at least twice and were always on the look-out for some bargains to supplements our stocks. Charters Towers came up trumps offering ‘Hits of the Beach Boys’ for only $6.95. The drive into the town of Townsville was marred by Alyce’s rapidly deteriorating clutch; while not so problematic on the open highway and in the smaller towns, in a bustling metropolis replete with traffic lights, and traffic, it was proving a different proposition altogether. We eventually managed to find a lovely caravan park by the beach. Given the stuffy heat, Joe and I were keen to throw ourselves into the sea, but as we neared the water we


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noticed numerous signs telling us how to resuscitate someone stung by the deadly jellyfish which were so plentiful at this time of the year. Joe got into me about how soft I was for not taking a dip, pointing out that it was only a matter of weeks before the jellyfish season ended. However, he didn’t seem too upset when we opted for the stinger-free and amplesized caravan park swimming pool. As well as being home to beautiful beaches and friendly locals, Townsville was also home to a disproportionate number of Suzuki Mighty Boys, one of the few motor vehicles produced in the mid 80s which was even less practical than the Piazza. Townsville also threw up a pleasant surprise in that it marked a new low on the James Boags Premium Price Index. Having paid as much as $21 for a six-pack of this liquid gold in other parts of the country, we were more than a little delighted to be charged the meagre sum of $8.70 here in the Far North. Normally, we’re very honest and morally steadfast, but although we were sure that this had to be a mistake, we quickly handed over the cash and left the bottleshop before the cashier realised his error. The drive from Townsville to Cairns was certainly impressive. We were seeing a part of Queensland, Australia for that matter, that we had never seen before, but thanks to the invention of television we knew exactly what it looked like. It was also thanks to the magic of television that we knew any of these places existed, having learnt of towns like Innisfail and Mission Creek because they were home to Pluckaduck contestants on ‘Hey Hey It’s Saturday’. This tropical part of the world was exactly as we had seen on TV—the rolling green land of the cane toad, endless fields of sugar cane, bananas and rainforest-covered mountain


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‘The driver is confronted by no fewer than 20 warning . . .’ 139

ranges. The drive would have been all the more enjoyable had Alyce been in working order, but our temperamental red mistress’s clutch was seemingly close to a slow painful death. We were both full of excitement as we drove into Cairns. Firstly, it was a milestone: the northernmost point on our trip, that last stop before we were on the home stretch. Secondly, we were looking forward to the comfort of the Cairns Sofitel where Chris’s dad, Lloyd, was staying on his way to Papua New Guinea and had kindly offered to put us up for the night. And thirdly, and probably most importantly, we knew that Alyce had survived the toughest parts of the journey. No more 700-kilometre stretches through the outback, and from now on we would always be in relatively close proximity to a decent mechanic. As it turned out, reason three came into play pretty much straightaway. As we sat idling at the traffic lights about five minutes from the town centre, all tension in the clutch just disappeared and Alyce stalled right in the middle of a multilane highway. After a couple of seconds of random swearing we both snapped into our well-rehearsed drill. I popped the bonnet and ran around the front, while Chris popped the boot and raced around to the back to grab the clutch fluid, lobbed it over the top to me, leapt into the driver’s seat and pumped the clutch as I topped up the reservoir. A Ferrari pit crew couldn’t have done it quicker. Then again a Ferrari pit crew generally don’t drive 10 000 kilometres on a dodgy clutch. Alyce limped into town and the Sofitel where Lloyd was waiting for us. As soon as we parked we popped open the bonnet to survey the scene. The clutch fluid we had put in not five


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140 In Search of the Holden Piazza minutes earlier was spewing out of the reservoir and down into the street. Despite the inconvenience of a car which was inoperable, we were able to look on the bright side—we were about to use our interstate gold-plated roadside assist card for the first time on the trip. After finally establishing where we were with the seemingly uninterested RACQ telephone operator, we had no option but to sit by the side of the road and wait. In the small amount of time we had been in Cairns, I had found the city to be quite pleasant, warm and, as expected, bustling with tourists. Actually, we couldn’t believe how many tourists there seemed to be. As we waited for nearly an hour for the roadside assistance, convoy after convoy of buses pulled up to the kerb, allowing literally hundreds upon hundreds of Asian visitors to alight and shuffle eagerly into a store behind us. Curiosity eventually got the better of us and we turned around to see just what we were missing out on. As we peered through the store windows we immediately understood the reason for the excitement. Inside were rows and rows of tea towels, t-shirts, mugs, pens and aprons bearing Ken Done’s iconic images of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House. As we watched the masses streaming in, we were witnessing a simile unfold before our eyes. From that moment on, whenever we saw too many people trying to fit into a confined space, it was to be described as being ‘like Asian tourists in a Ken Done shop’. After witnessing the mass migration of tourists from coach to shops and back again, and having received some pretty unhelpful advice along the lines of ‘Gee, you’d better get that looked at’ from the RACQ officer who was dispatched


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to help us, we managed to nurse Alyce to the closest clutch specialist to be repaired overnight then went back to the hotel where Dad was waiting and apparently developing a powerful thirst. I get the impression that Lloyd was grateful for a bit of company, having commuted for business between Hobart and Port Moresby via Cairns for quite a few years, usually sitting around the hotel by himself. As soon as we walked back in the door after dropping off Alyce, Chris and I were encouraged to change out of blue singlets and footy shorts (which had raised a few eyebrows in the hotel foyer) into something more appropriate in which to hit the town. A couple of quick beers before dinner turned into quite a few beers before we set off to have our first decent meal in quite some time. A couple of glasses of wine with our delicious seafood dinner turned into a couple of bottles, and a couple of nightcaps at the casino bar afterwards turned into a free-forall piss-up. After each of us had signalled our intention to have ‘just one more’ about six or seven times, proceedings wrapped up at, I think, around 1.00 a.m. Luckily for me I later discovered that at some stage I had ventured into the casino to try my luck on the pokies and had come up trumps with a $38 win . . . I just hope that the return was more than I had pumped into the machine in the first place! Joe and I woke up feeling, well, like complete shit (again). Dad, with his plane to catch, took great pleasure in the adage, ‘Well, if I’m up then you should be too.’ Thankfully, though, just as he was about to jump in his taxi to leave for the airport Dad confided in me that he felt pretty rotten as well. With this comforting knowledge, Joe and I took to wandering


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aimlessly around Cairns. It was too early to book into another place to stay, even though we both desperately wanted to go back to bed, and it was also too early to collect Alyce from the clutch mechanic, so we ambled along the foreshore and took in the impressive sight of Cairns’s artificial beach. Many first-time visitors to Cairns are surprised to find that the township is not located along a string of pristine palmfringed white beaches, but is instead hemmed in by a swampy river. Tip for new players: the best beaches are found to both the north and south of Cairns. Joe and I continued our pointless meanderings, stopping only to consume an energy drink, before we found a tourist information bureau. We browsed through the immense array of brochures spruiking the innumerable activities one can undertake in the area, including glass-bottom boats and diving on the Great Barrier Reef, a round of golf, parasailing, rainforest walks and cross-stitch needlework. While Joe and I would probably have plumped for the last one if we had had time, what we really needed, once again, was a place to stay. I wandered closer to the information desk. ‘Can I help you?’ asked the lady behind the counter. ‘Um, I’m not sure,’ I replied, finding that my brain was yet to start functioning for the day. ‘Are you looking to book a tour or other adventure?’ she asked kindly. ‘I don’t think so, but we might need somewhere to sleep soon,’ I said. The bureau lady then became a picture of efficiency, effortlessly finding us a cheap room to ourselves in a well-appointed backpackers hostel. What’s more, she


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even ensured that we could check in extra early which meant we could go and lie down for a while! After reviving ourselves with a lie-down and a trip to a pie shop, it was time to go and collect our little red friend from her sleepover at the clutch specialist. It was exciting to be behind the wheel of a car that not only still contained all of our possessions but also had a perfectly working clutch. Driving was a breeze: you could select any gear you wanted, when you wanted, without worry of stalling the car, or leaving the pedal stuck to the floor and having to pull over to the side of a busy highway. Luxury. And so, with Alyce back on the road, we were back to the quest. We pointed fully functioning Alyce towards the main road that had led us into Cairns the previous day. Chris and I were off to see our first Piazza since Western Australia. We expertly navigated our way through suburban Cairns (mostly out of luck) to meet John, where we were greeted by the sight of a shiny blue Piazza in the carport. After admiring it for just a few seconds, we stepped towards the front door, but before we got there, a middle-aged bloke in the traditional Cairns uniform of shorts, t-shirt and thongs opened it up and said, ‘G’day, I’m John, I heard your car coming’. It was true that now the clutch was back in working order, Alyce was running a bit like a truck, but with the original Clarion stereo pumping inside Chris and I were unaware just how loud she’d become. We soon learnt that the blue beast in John’s carport was not the first Piazza he’d owned. A couple of others had served him faithfully until a series of increasingly expensive problems had forced him to sell them to other unsuspecting Piazza aficionados. Despite this unhappy history John told us that he liked Piazzas


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144 In Search of the Holden Piazza and thought ‘they were great little cars’. Which struck us as odd given that his previous two had clearly caused him a fair bit of grief by breaking down regularly. You can’t but respect that kind of blind loyalty. Although metallic blue was one of the rarer colour choices, John’s car was otherwise completely unremarkable. While not in absolute showroom condition, it certainly wasn’t a bomb. John was aware of the care and attention these little babies required to keep them in working order. The clean, but worn interior showed signs of a man who enjoyed driving; a slight imprint of John’s backside in the driver’s seat, a pair of sunglasses on the dashboard and a selection of tapes to suit whatever mood he was in. John was probably close to the oldest Piazza owner we had found. Older people generally have more sense than to dabble in such financial liabilities. Owning a Piazza at John’s age, over 50, could do some serious damage to one’s superannuation and subsequent retirement. Unfortunately for John, it wasn’t his metallic blue Piazza that was causing him financial difficulties, it was his employment situation. He’d recently lost his job in the IT sector. This meant he was no longer able to push his baby as hard as he used to, not having the spare cash to throw at petrol and maintenance from his current work as a cleaner. If it isn’t already clear to you by now, Piazza owners are an interesting breed. Instead of finding a homogenous tribe of young blokes in their ‘fully sick’ turbos, as we had expected, we had found that the only thing all Piazza owners had in common was the fact they owned Piazzas. Oh, and we’d yet to come across a female owner. After catching up with Australia’s northernmost Piazza, we cruised back into town and, along the way, discussed the


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fact that our time was fast running out, and the importance of making every Piazza count. We also debated the merits of checking out the local nightlife. We decided against it, however, when we recalled the words of the cabbie who had taken us to pick up Alyce: ‘You guys should check out Shenanigans tonight. It goes off.’ There had been enough shenanigans with Dad the previous night and at a number of similarly named establishments around the country, so instead we decided to grab some dinner and retreat to our room to organise our itinerary for the remainder of the trip. Looking for somewhere to dine we shuddered involuntarily as we walked past Shenanigans. The night was still young but already there were a number of patrons who had clearly consumed more than enough booze. Nothing was going to get us into said establishment that evening, unless of course the delightful young kebab technician from whom we’d purchased our dinner would have told us she was heading there after knock-off. Natalie, as she’d introduced herself, was a perky young French girl who’d been travelling around Australia for around ten months. She must have been taking things pretty easy as in that time she had only managed to get from Sydney to Cairns, although she was looking to move on. Cairns, she explained in her gorgeous French accent, had been a lot of fun, but she’d really imagined herself working on a reef cruise rather than wrapping lamb in a street-side kebabery. Similarly, Joe and I had seen ourselves windsurfing and snorkelling around the reef, not strolling around trying to fend off significant hangovers—life rarely goes to plan.


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146 In Search of the Holden Piazza When we were done wowing Natalie with our knowledge of the French language and our perfect pronunciation of Jacques Cousteau, Zinedine Zidane and Henri Leconte, we took our kebabs and headed back to the hostel for a quiet night in front of la télévision. I was disappointed to leave Cairns. It had struck me as a place where I could rest my weary steering arms for awhile. Feeling considerably better than we had the previous day, we retraced our steps to Airlie Beach, just south of Townsville. The drive was, as you would expect, nearly identical to the drive up. With 646 kilometres under our belts, it was dark when we arrived at the ‘Gateway to the Whitsundays’. Now, it doesn’t happen very often, but occasionally I am wrong. This happened to be one such occasion. Although I was having a great time, the sad truth is, although I never said it to Chris, I would have given Airlie Beach a big miss. Let’s face it, it’s not like we’ve ever done anything in any of these ‘must see’ destinations anyway . . . so I was sure that Airlie Beach would be equally pointless. Things started out pretty much as per the usual routine: find cheap accommodation, check the TV reception, head out to grab some dinner and beers to take back. But while we were out searching for food and beverages we realised Airlie was not like the other ‘must see’ destinations we’d visited. By the time we’d walked down the main street, grabbed some fish and chips and returned to our room, we had been approached by at least a dozen attractive young ladies offering drink vouchers, free entry to nightclubs vouchers and many reasons why we should frequent the particular venue which was paying them to tempt schmucks like us.


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‘The driver is confronted by no fewer than 20 warning . . .’ 147 Generally, I’d like to think that I’m not so easily swayed by tacky marketing ploys, but tonight, we were heading out! Primed to hit the pubs and with our pockets full of vouchers, Chris and I started off the evening in a large open-air bar, a short walk down the road. What we saw there surprised even us—it was full of drunken idiots carrying on in front of a giant screen showing the soccer. We parted with a couple of vouchers but quickly tired of pasty white Poms slurring about ‘reaaaalll football’ so we decided it was time to find another drinking venue. Being lazy sods, we opted for one of the two pubs closest to where we were. Now you probably won’t believe me when I tell you that Joe and I stumbled across our very first wet t-shirt competition by complete accident. You probably also won’t believe that we somehow missed the 37 000-odd signs scattered throughout the centre of Airlie Beach highlighting the, well, highlight of the night, but it’s true. Once Joe and I realised what was about to happen, we immediately began exploring the merits of partaking in looking on as scantily clad women paraded before a large alcohol- and testosterone-fuelled crowd, being treated as mere sex objects. An extract of this highly complex and intensive debate is reproduced for you below: Joe: We want to see all the young girls in wet white tshirts, don’t we Chris? Chris: Yes Joe, we sure do. In the interests of correctly imparting to you exactly what we saw that night, I have documented the following account . . . in great detail. About 12 girls had signed up on the night, seemingly unable to resist the lure of an extra $500 cash to spend on their backpacking holidays—and new t-shirts. By


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the time they came out to strut their stuff, the bar was nearly as packed as a Ken Done store full of Asian tourists. The girls were mostly from England, Wales and Ireland with two from Belgium. One by one the girls would step forward to the stage in their pristine white t-shirts and, as requested by the guy holding the microphone and running the show, would drop to their knees for jugs of water to be poured over them by drunken males from the crowd. The premise of the competition was that the girls who received the largest cheer would remain in the race for a second round. The respective cheers were measured by a security guard holding some sort of noise meter—whether or not it actually worked I am not sure, but the sight of a moving needle, imaginary or otherwise, certainly got the crowd fired up. Obviously, those girls who ‘entertained’ the unruly crowd the most got the loudest cheers and those who had been chosen for the next round had clearly got the hang of how to stay in the running with elaborate dance routines and ample displays of breasts. I turned to Joe to comment upon the interesting geographical spread of the contestants but he wasn’t there: he had worked his way to the front of the crowd, presumably to ensure his cheering was being correctly measured. The competition climaxed with two very attractive young ladies— the buxom blonde Briton versus the beautiful brunette Belgian—whipping the crowd into a frenzy with extravagant manoeuvres requiring extraordinary flexibility. The Belgian took out the tightly contested final round with a display that


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wouldn’t have been out of place at an establishment which would probably cost a lot more to enter than the one we were in. As I rejoined Joe for the walk back to our room, we exchanged views on how we thought the ladies handled themselves in the heat of the fierce competition. We agreed that wet t-shirt competitions, in general, were the winner on the night. After all the excitement, we had every intention of calling it a night. But unfortunately for us we noticed that the bar situated within the grounds of our motel was still going strong and so decided that a game of pool was in order. It’s hard to believe, I know, but Chris and I were still two of the most sober residents of Airlie Beach that night. One of the less stable customers that we met at the motel bar was Keiron, an Irish bloke, who thrust $20 into my hand and asked me for a cigarette before walking off when I told him I didn’t have any. This incident sparked something in my conscience. Call it the Code of the Pissed Idiot, if you will, but in all my times of being completely hammered I’d rarely been taken advantage of in such a manner, so I immediately chased after Keiron to give him his cash back. The bar’s bouncers witnessed this Samaritan gesture and Chris, Keiron and I were invited to hang about after closing time for more beer. When the three of us finally left the bar for our respective rooms, Kerion entertained us along the way by demonstrating his Aussie accent. His ‘fair farkin’ dinkum’ was pretty convincing, despite the fact that it was about three in the morning and he was plastered. We hope he made it to the 7.00 a.m. cruise he had planned. Now I’m not the sort of person to sit and let things fester, so the next morning, after only two months of ignoring my


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progressively worse, weeping, sore feet, I decided to take immediate action and seek a chemist to see what they could do for me. Although, I’d recently learnt to cope with my podiatry problems, Joe had for some time been insisting that professional help might be required. Quite frankly, I’m not sure that his concern was entirely for my benefit; on more than one occasion he had commented that he’d been finding it very difficult to keep his lunch down when I put my feet up on the dashboard during his extended driving stints. Also, I think someone might have stepped on my foot during the previous evening’s wet t-shirt competition and one of my well-formed scabs had been dislodged causing a glistening trail of pus to ooze from my foot when I walked. Damn. The assistant behind the counter was gorgeous. I couldn’t go and corrupt this beautiful creature’s mind with my crusty feet. I glanced at the shelf on my right and quickly decided that it was probably a better idea to let her look at my feet than purchase what was on offer—and anyway, I wasn’t really in the market for pubic lice powder. I slipped off my thongs and waited for a reaction. ‘Hmmm, I think I better go get Barry,’ she said walking away. Barry? Who was Barry? Was Barry the Airlie Beach crusty feet expert? Maybe plenty of holidaymakers presented their feet to Barry each week? Barry turned out to be the whitecoated, cropped-hair sporting, bespectacled pharmacist. ‘Right, well, you’ll need an eczema cream, probably also something for your tinea and maybe a general moisturiser,’ he said efficiently. ‘But what happened to your big toe nail?’


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Remembering the blood splattered Darwin footpaths, I mumbled ‘Not sure’, and hoped the remainder of my time in the chemist would be brief and that it wouldn’t be long before the days of unblemished feet returned.


11

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‘Just sitting in it is pure pleasure.’

‘Just sitting in it is pure pleasure.’

I was really looking forward to hitting Brisbane. After spending the past few evenings in such godforsaken locations as Townsville, Cairns and Airlie Beach (okay, so now I’m just rubbing it in), Brisbane was a chance to catch up with some mates, and of course to see a few more Piazza owners. It was also another opportunity for Chris and I to have nothing to do with each other. Nothing against the bloke, but there’s only so much time you can spend in close proximity to those feet. It became apparent on the drive into the city of Brisbane that Joe and I had absolutely no idea where we were going, let alone how we would get there. I admit that we had had some struggles with directions and driving over the course of our journey so far, but trying to navigate around Brisbane

152


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‘Just sitting in it is pure pleasure.’ 153

was easily the most difficult task we had been confronted with. The snaking nature of the Brisbane River meant we couldn’t actually work out which direction we were headed. Some of you reading this might be expert Brisbane navigators and probably think that Joe and I are complete idiots, but I can only trust there are others out there who are more sympathetic to our troubles. And surely it’s no accident that at the time of writing the top 20 bestselling non-fiction books in Australia included Brisbane, Gold Coast & Sunshine Coast: UBD Street Directories at number 17, and Brisway: Brisbane, Sunshine Coast & Gold Coast Street Directories coming in at a lofty 14. I mean it’s all very well to get up to speed with Mao’s Last Dancer (atop at number 1), but I know which book I’d rather have on hand in the Queensland capital. On numerous occasions I had to calmly inform Joe that I was about to pull over so that we could ‘re-group and consolidate our approach’. After said navigational issues, we found ourselves outside Fillipo’s place, in a nice quiet suburb overlooking the city. Our visit with Fillipo turned out to be one of the most memorable Piazza visits on the entire quest. Fil was a very excitable young bloke with a shiny white Piazza which he’d obviously put a whole lot of time, effort and money into. Before starting this journey, when I thought ‘Japanese turbo sports coupes’ something like Fil’s car would have come to mind. Fluorescent lights, booming stereo and a little silver soccer ball hanging from the rear view mirror. The stand-out feature of Fil’s car, however, was the personalised number plates. Unable to get his hands on the Queensland ‘PIAZZA’ plates, Fil, having recently celebrated his


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154 In Search of the Holden Piazza 21st birthday, had decided that the way to go was ‘21WOG’. Brilliant stuff. After coffee and biscotti with the family and Fil’s mate Sam, it was time to see how the 21WOG-mobile really stacked up. As he drove us around the suburbs, it was clear that we’d managed to fool someone. Fil kept asking Chris and I for advice on how to get better performance, where to get parts and even what sort of wheels to put on the thing. It was quite apparent that Fil’s little white beast looked and ran a lot better than poor old Alyce, yet the kid was convinced we were some sort of gurus. In the end, we bluffed a bit and told him that there were plenty of things he could do, but as a young bloke he shouldn’t be pumping too much money into his car because it’s not the sort of investment he was ever going to make a profit on. I think Fil’s dad, Joe, was pretty happy with this advice. He joked that Fillipo hadn’t slept for nearly three months because he was so excited that a couple of Piazza experts were coming to town. Leaving Fil to his obsession, Chris and I went our separate ways and I cruised up to the Marriot Hotel to meet Danni, who had flown in to Brisbane for the night. Dunno how Chris was faring with his mates across town, but I was loving the change from a skinny vinyl mattress in a tin box. Not to mention some time with my girlfriend. I strolled around Brisbane with Danni for a couple of hours the next morning before it was time to part with her once more, meet up with Chris, reform Team Piazza, and hit the road again. We had a particularly busy schedule that day, and our unfamiliarity with Brisbane’s outer suburbs would stretch us considerably.


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‘Just sitting in it is pure pleasure.’ 155 Our first stop was supposed to be Kilcoy. A young fella named Chris was going to meet us there and escort us to his place because it was, and I quote, ‘a little hard to find’. Finding Chris in Kilcoy, however, was secondary to a more pressing issue that had arisen—finding our own car. In his haste to get back into town to meet me, our Chris (henceforth to be known as Numbnuts) had completely forgotten where he’d parked her. Sure, so I occasionally vague out a little and forget to look to see what level I’m on, but Numbnuts had no idea which car park he’d left Alyce in. While Joe had opted to spend our first night in Brisbane in the luxury of a hotel with Danni (who was showing quite an interest in our quest, or more specifically, my co-driver, by following us around the country), I met up with an old school mate, Ryan, whom I hadn’t seen in nine years, and his financée Belinda. Ryan and I had a lot of catching up to do and chatted and drank well into the night. I’ve got a feeling that this contributed to my vagueness in the morning. Having searched just about every car park in Brisbane, we finally tracked down Alyce, and set off for Kilcoy, only running an hour or so late at this stage. Having only a passing familiarity with Brisbane from family holidays to Expo ’88 17 years earlier, and a couple of more recent but less memorable business trips, we were unaware that, rather than being in the outer suburbs, as we had assumed, Kilcoy is actually a town some 90 minutes out of the city (if you’re a bad navigator, as I am). When we finally found it, Chris was waiting patiently in his Landcruiser. Chris from Kilcoy had told me on the phone that his Piazza was not currently registered so we weren’t concerned when he met us at the designated spot in a different vehicle. We should,


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156 In Search of the Holden Piazza however, have been a little concerned when his chosen mode of transport turned out to be a whopping great four-wheel drive. As Chris pulled out in his Cruiser, we followed along behind, mindful of the fact that we’d arranged two more meetings that afternoon and we were already running late. A ‘few minutes up the road’ was actually a good 20 or so over some of the toughest terrain Alyce had endured on our entire trip. Even our new buddy Chris was getting his four-wheel drive sideways on some of the steep, uphill corners. The pouring rain certainly didn’t help either. To his credit, despite lacking the torque and traction of the Cruiser in front, our Chris kept on the other Chris’s tail all the way up to his house in the hills. I guess this is due to our Chris’s upbringing in rural Kaoota, outside Hobart, and the many wet afternoons of his misspent youth that he and his brother spent thrashing their mighty Holden Drover around their property. Apparently, our Chris also later honed his skills at lunchtimes and during free periods in the bush surrounds of Hobart College. Anyway, kudos for the display he put on that afternoon. Kilcoy Chris was a man who loved his Geminis, and initially he was pretty keen to rip the guts out of the Piazza he’d acquired and slip them into the Gemini from hell. Luckily, commonsense prevailed and instead he had decided to save the Piazza from seeing out its days in a wrecking yard and had done a bit of work to get it together. We’d heard a number of horror stories about guys like Kilcoy Chris who had mutilated poor defenceless Piazzas and transplanted their internal organs into Geminis. I’ve got a bit of advice for these blokes—buy a decent car in the first place so you don’t have to replace the engine. We don’t know how many Piazzas have suffered this fate, but crippling a classic sports coupe to spice up a Gemini just doesn’t make sense.


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‘Just sitting in it is pure pleasure.’ 157 Having seen the light, Kilcoy Chris had taken his Piazza for a road-worthy inspection just days before we met him and unfortunately he had been knocked back. He invited us to inspect the vehicle and see if we could discover the problem. Once again, I think our new friend was under the false impression that we had a few clues about what we were doing. Fortunately for us the manner in which he posed the question led us to suspect that the fault was very minor and so we wouldn’t look like complete idiots if we couldn’t find it. We looked over the vehicle reasonably thoroughly, mentally calculating how long we’d have to pretend to be searching for some minor fault before we could say, ‘I give up, what’s wrong with it?’ without losing face. We decided that we shouldn’t wait too long as it was pissing down with rain and we were already late for our next meeting and an interview with ABC radio in Hobart. We shot each other a meaningful glance, turned to Kilcoy Chris and shrugged our shoulders. He pointed to a couple of places where the roof lining was starting to sag. The upholstery was the only thing keeping his Piazza off the road. My thoughts turned to the Queensland traffic authorities and the enormous bugs they must have up their butts if they wanted to keep this piece of Holden history stuck in a garage. Before heading off, we told Chris about a mass Piazza gathering we were planning for that evening at the Logan Hyperdome (alright, it’s a shopping centre), right under a handily placed ‘Piazza’ sign. Although Kilcoy Chris was keen to catch up with a few Piazza owners slightly more knowledgeable than ourselves, he apologised, saying he probably wouldn’t be able to get there in time. What he should have said was, ‘Even if I leave


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158 In Search of the Holden Piazza right now I wouldn’t get there in time so I don’t know why you two jokers think you can.’ As we headed back towards town, Chris did the interview with ABC over his mobile phone and I called our afternoon’s other appointment, Ian, and apologised that we wouldn’t be able to make it. I think he’d gathered this given we were already more than an hour or so late. Apparently Kilcoy to Logan is about the maximum possible distance you can travel within the ‘Greater Brisbane Area’. The sheer distance alone, however, was not the only thing conspiring against us. Of course, Brisbane has the worst-designed road network in the country, exacerbated by the fact that this was the only capital city where we didn’t have the benefit of a street directory, relying instead on our superbly tuned senses of direction (ha!). We knew it was going to be a struggle, but we were determined not to let down the Piazza fans assembled at Logan. It was about this time I started to wish I had a better mobile phone plan. Dozens of calls were made between Kilcoy and Logan. Most of which fell into one of three categories: • me to Matt (our contact for the mass Piazza meeting), apologising that we would be running late • the ever-enthusiastic Filippo to me, saying that his enthusiasm was dwindling and if we didn’t show up soon he was leaving • me to Matt, explaining that we were hopelessly lost. Instead of arriving under the ‘Piazza’ sign at the Logan Hyperdome in the afternoon to find a fleet of Piazzas waiting for us, we were forced to meet Matt and Darren at a servo in the dark. The other Piazza owners we’d contacted had either


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‘Just sitting in it is pure pleasure.’ 159 left, or not bothered to show up at all. True to his word, though, Filippo had come along and had a chat to Matt and Darren and expressed his interest in forming a Piazza cruising club. Apparently Matt and Darren had said all the right things and nodded in the right places when Fil asked them what they thought of his car, but like Chris and myself they just didn’t have the youthful exuberance to match. Fillipo would have been devastated to miss out on the three-car Piazza convoy from the Logan servo up to the Hyperdome for the planned photo shoot. Matt and Darren were unlike any of the other Piazza owners we’d met along the way: they didn’t obsess about their cars and they didn’t vigorously defend Piazzas against some of the claims made in the press. In fact, these fellas found an almost comical appeal in their vehicles. They estimated that between the two of them they’d owned close to 20 Piazzas, and knew of just about all the people we’d spoken to in other states over the past few months. Instead of having the hottest-looking beasts around, however, their current Piazzas were complete duds. Matt had painted his entire car a blotchy matte black (including the rims) and, much to his mate Darren’s disgust, was toying with the idea of painting flames up the bonnet or installing scrolling red lights like those on the front of Knight Rider’s KITT. Filippo had apparently given an enthusiastic, if somewhat confused, thumbs up to this idea, and Chris and I urged him to go ahead with it. What’s more, Matt and Darren completely understood what Piazza Search was all about—simply having a laugh and following through on a stupid, drunken idea, that really should have been forgotten as soon as we’d sobered up after New Year’s Eve. As such, rather than be annoyed by our lateness and general crapness,


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160 In Search of the Holden Piazza they were highly amused that we had attempted such an ambitious project without a clue about what we were doing. When asked why they’d each had so many Piazzas, Matt and Darren simply replied that the cars were fun. We certainly couldn’t argue with that. Chris and I had been having a ball, bouncing around the countryside tracking down the forgotten coupe. Although I think they were referring more to the handling (or lack thereof), the tendency to nosedive under brakes and the skittish rear suspension. Still, for two guys who didn’t take their cars seriously, they sure took their cars seriously. Apart from the 17 or so Piazzas that had been through his garage, Matt had a selection of spare parts ordered from the United States. Upon hearing this, we decided that it might be worth keeping Matt’s number in my phone, lest anything go wrong with Alyce between here and Hobart. After a good hour or so of chatting to Matt and Darren (predominantly about trivial items with absolutely no connection to Piazzas or our mission), we promised to stay in touch (we haven’t, sorry guys) and headed back into town. After our big day traversing the absolute boundaries of the Greater Brisbane region, I dropped Joe in town to fend for himself. He was off to stay with his friend Esther and her two flatmates. Although Esther’s place was pretty close to town, it was in the exact opposite direction to where I was headed and I was keen to get off the befuddling Brisbane roads as soon as possible. I wished Joe a pleasant evening, and headed off to find my accommodation for the evening. That night I was staying at my high school buddy Drummond’s apartment in Indooroopilly. Drummond, a proud Royal Australian Air Force officer, is a gregarious character who


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always displays an ample zest for life to complement an abundant appetite for jokes. After a few beers at his inviting apartment we headed off to the pub for some more. On the way out the door I slipped down some wet concrete steps, my left arm and backside taking the full force of my fall. Still, nothing better than a few more beers to see one right. I woke up the next morning feeling extremely ordinary. In addition to my throbbing head, I was aching from my fall down the steps and my itching feet did not appear to be on the mend either. My day didn’t get any better when, after a hearty breakfast designed to cure the pain, I realised that I had lost my wallet. Thankfully some kind soul had found it in the cafe where I had been eating then handed it in, but still this didn’t bode well. Driving in the hilly suburbs of Brisbane that wet morning proved to be one of the more challenging parts of the trip for me. Alyce’s rear end was sliding all over the place no matter how lightly I touched her accelerator. The handling conditions were made worse by the fact that both Joe and I had removed most of our possessions from the boot, thus reducing any remnants of sensible weight distribution that I may have had. I was on a mission though and that was to find Joe without pranging the car. Luckily by now I had garnered some form of understanding of the city’s lay-out. All I had to do was stick to the same side of the river and skirt the northern side of the city centre. I didn’t even need to cross the river once. So how I ended up crossing it four times is beyond me. By the time I reached Esther’s place to pick up Joe I was pleased to find him in a similarly frazzled frame of mind. It seemed that an evening


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of red wine, Chinese arthouse movies and female company had not been the tonic to calm Joe’s nerves which, like mine, were shot from trying to navigate around Brisbane. The frustration of traversing Australia’s worst-planned city without the help of a road map had worn us both down. Nothing was where all logic dictated it should be. Holidaying in Brisbane is one thing, trying to locate far-flung suburbs was something else entirely. Our itinerary was always going to be fairly flexible, with the possibility of a third night in Brisbane if required, but the illogical mess of Brisbane’s traffic network had defeated us and before we had even embarked on the day’s Piazzasearching activities we knew that the best option was to get out as soon as our work there was done. We agreed to hunt down the last couple of Brisbane Piazzas and then head off that night for Byron Bay, a brisk jaunt, less than 200 kilometres down the freeway. With that night’s itinerary agreed, it was finally time for us to meet up with Ian, whom we’d bailed on the previous day. Ian’s place at Walloon was once again pushing the boundaries of Greater Brisbane and our navigational skills, but when we finally made it to his modern brick home in its semi-rural surrounds we were greeted by a through-and-through automotive nut. Here we bluffed our way through conversations regarding the various series of Gemini parked in his backyard and were finally led to the two Piazzas parked next to the shed. Neither of them was running and although Ian assured us he was working on getting one back on the road, a hot tip from our mates Matt and Darren, who had spoken to Ian before, was that it was never going to happen. We’d also been warned by said mates that we


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‘Just sitting in it is pure pleasure.’ 163 would need to set aside a bit of time for our meeting with Ian because he had the capacity and know-how to tell us just about everything there was to know about the Piazza, and chances are, whether we liked it or not, he would. Luckily, the tranquil bush setting helped to erase our memories of the horrors of inner-city driving in Brisbane and we soon forgot how much of a hurry we were in and settled down to immerse ourselves in Ian’s encyclopaedic knowledge. How much of it was actually absorbed is another matter entirely. As well as the many cars Ian had scattered across his property, his collection of bits of cars was even more astounding. Parts from all makes and models filled the enormous shed which also housed his latest passion, motorbikes. From what we could gather, Ian had every intention of getting all of these vehicles back on the road, someday, but whenever he was coming close, something else would commandeer his focus and the current project would be relegated to the back of the shed. The Series II Gemini had turned up just as Ian was approaching the final stages of getting the Series I on the road. The first Piazza, which he figured might be a bit of fun, derailed the Series II project, before the second Piazza came along and changed his priorities again. Work on the Piazzas had stalled when a rare 1960s Chevrolet Chevette had appeared in the local Trading Post and Ian had decided that it might be a worthwhile investment. But while the Chevette was obviously still close to Ian’s heart, all cars had been put on hold as motorcycle mania had taken over. Our eyes glazed over somewhat at this point—despite being used to bluffing about cars which we knew little about, motorcycles were something else entirely.


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164 In Search of the Holden Piazza For the record, the little Chevy parked behind Ian’s shed was unlike anything I’d seen on Australian roads and my advice to Ian would be to forget the bikes, Geminis and even Piazzas and get that Chevette in working order. After a tour of the backyard, Ian invited us inside his house to look over his collection of motoring literature. He pulled from the shelf a file entitled ‘Piazza’ and proceeded to show us all the articles he’d tracked down over the years, most of which other kind donors had already provided to us, thereby preventing us from looking like complete amateurs. There were, however, a few articles we hadn’t seen before, including some features on a really hot-looking Piazza in Sydney and one from the local Brisbane newspaper about two good-looking blokes from Tassie who were travelling the country in search of this misunderstood motoring marvel. By the time we left Ian’s place, the sky was darkening and it looked like it was about to rain. Exasperated from our confusing time on Brisbane’s roads, we had our hearts set on making it to the relaxing environs of Byron Bay that night. But there was still one final order of business. During the same radio interview where I’d first encountered Filippo, I also chatted to a fella named Franko who promised that he had the hottest Piazza in Australia. Up to this point, Malcolm from Melbourne still had the trophy firmly in his grasp, but we decided that we would have to see Franko’s car before we got the hell out of this town planner’s nightmare and escaped down the coast. By the time our initial call to Franko revealed that it was going to be difficult to tee up a meeting, our frustration with trying to negotiate the streets of Brisbane had grown to the


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‘Just sitting in it is pure pleasure.’ 165 point where we were almost going to forgo seeing this beast. But so confident was Franko that his Piazza would shame any of the others we’d seen, he agreed to drop everything and race across town to where his car was parked so we could verify for ourselves that it was indeed the hottest Piazza in Australia. We were delighted when Franko revealed that he had his car garaged literally around the corner from the irrepressible Filippo. This meant we could get there without having to aimlessly drive around the streets of Brisbane tearing our hair out in frustration. While Chris and I were really keen to see ‘the hottest Piazza in Australia’ we were even keener to escape the Brisvegas roads and point Alyce towards Byron Bay. When we arrived at Franko’s place, Chris and I were in no doubt that we were in fact in the presence of Piazza royalty. Although Franko’s car had the Queensland set of “PIAZZA” number plates that Filippo was after, the similarities between it and our Alyce ended there. Franko’s Piazza had a custom Pearl White paint job, which shimmered and changed tones as the light moved across it. This was complemented by massive, shiny 18-inch alloys with tyres about as thick as liquorice straps. It had a custom air scoop on the bonnet, and a full leather interior. Meeting this car was truly a life-changing moment for us as we realised that the Piazza was not just an object of derision for all other turbo owners, nor was it just a treasure trove of parts for Gemini-obsessed bogans. The Piazza, in its own right, was a hot little turbo racer. Franko, a young, quietly spoken Asian fellow and an upholsterer by trade, explained how at first he had simply liked the car but then just kept on pouring money into it without actually realising how far he’d taken things. The interior he’d


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166 In Search of the Holden Piazza done himself, using his industry connections, and the mechanical aspects had been taken care of by a trusted friend after all other mechanics in Brisbane had refused to touch it. Having upgraded to a very tidy Mazda MX5, Franko ruefully admitted to us that he had considered selling his Piazza, but he didn’t think that after all the time, money and effort he’d put into it he could bear to part with it. A massive grin crossed Franko’s face as he turned the key and the car roared to life. ‘Three-and-a-half’s all the way through,’ he said with pride. Chris and I had learned by now that this was a reference to the exhaust so I gave an impressed whistle while throwing in an insightful comment about a bloke we’d come across who was running a three-and-a-half at the tail end and was having a few problems. ‘Yeah, well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ was Franko’s reply. Yeah, of course he would. Before he could realise that we knew nothing about threeand-a-half’s, we thanked Franko for this time and, with renewed faith and one last look at ‘the hottest Piazza in Australia’—yes, it really is—we jumped in Alyce and hit the road. By the time we reached Byron Bay it was about 9.00 p.m. and most of the caravan parks had closed for the evening. Upon driving up to reception at what looked to be our last option, and finding a closed sign, we stood in the downpour and, cursing and dispirited, contemplated our next move. Luckily for us the park owner happened to cruise past on his golf buggy and with some minor cajoling he was convinced to rent us a cabin. Though our estimation of him dropped a little when he refused to let two young girls set up tents for the night even though they arrived just moments after us.


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‘Just sitting in it is pure pleasure.’ 167 Chris and I considered letting them share our cabin with us and splitting the costs, but then I realised that I’d have to do the chivalrous thing and let them have the double bed while I took up the standard-issue skinny vinyl-covered bunk. I guess there were other options for sleeping arrangements, but, as Chris and I attested to our girlfriends when we recounted this story, these didn’t even occur to us at the time. I’d shared a car for almost three months with Joe, there was no way I was going to share a bed with him . . . oh, hang on, now I think I understand what he’s getting at.


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‘Driving it is a dimension beyond pleasure.’

‘Driving it is a dimension beyond pleasure.’

We left a wet Byron Bay, the easternmost point of our journey, and indeed the country, after a quick tour that took in the lighthouse overlooking the Bay and a couple of the local beaches. It was at moments like these that I wished we were devoid of any time constraints. Darwin, Cairns, Airlie Beach and Byron Bay were all places I would have loved to have spent more time in. Even though we’d driven around so much of the country, I still got the feeling that there was even more to see. This may have something to do with the fact that upon reaching each exotic location we’d been too buggered (or lazy) to enjoy them. But I just didn’t trust my flatmate to tape three months of ‘Home and Away’ for me so I was left with no other choice. 168


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‘Driving it is a dimension beyond pleasure.’ 169

We continued down the coast, and eventually found a bed for the night in Taree. The weather conditions during this part of the trip were the worst so far. The rain consistently teemed down and visibility was extremely poor. We have previously discussed Joe’s less than perfect driving abilities and on this day I was praying the he wouldn’t show me his worst. It’s always a little more difficult for the passenger, unable to perfectly anticipate when the application of brakes might occur or when the steering wheel might be turned. On both counts ‘a lot earlier’ might have been beneficial when Joe was behind the wheel. Still, as you would expect, after so long together in the car, we had a little system in place for times like these. Joe would drive in the manner he thought appropriate, and I would alert him to my increasing levels of discomfort by pushing an imaginary brake pedal into the floor, grabbing the handle above the window (or the ‘Jesus!’ bar as it is often referred to) and taking a very deep breath. To be fair, besides some less than adequate reversing, Joe drove with much aplomb, and better than his insurance and police records would suggest. The town of Taree turned out to be something of a highlight in a most unexpected way. We drove around looking for either of the caravan parks listed in our trusty accommodation guide for almost an hour (a tough thing to do considering Taree is not a big town) before pulling up, exasperated, on the main street to take stock of the situation. We decided our best bet was to go against our every male instinct and ask for directions. The hairdresser’s salon we’d pulled up next to still showed signs of life, whereas most of the rest of the street was deserted, being early Friday evening and all, so we decided it would be our target.


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170 In Search of the Holden Piazza No sooner had we got out of Alyce than a guy emerged from the salon, beer in hand, and mentioned something about the scarcity of Holden Piazzas on the road these days, and the coincidence of seeing us turn up in one just days after he’d heard something about a great Piazza search on the radio. Chris and I introduced ourselves and informed him that we were in fact those famed Piazza hunters. He introduced himself as Jeremy, president of the Taree chapter of the International Beer Club (IBC), and invited us into the salon to become instant honorary members. The IBC consisted of Jeremy and his mates, Mark, Clive and Carl, and each Friday they would meet, go to the bottleshop and grab a few six-packs of imported beers for consumption in Mark’s hairdressing salon. As well as receiving accurate directions to the caravan park, before we left the IBC boys we received some interesting opinions on politics, women and cars (particularly regarding the lunacy of driving a Piazza), and a couple of German beers. Another pleasantly surprising event during our IBC initiation was a pretty young girl standing in the rain staring at our car. Yeeehaaa! We’d finally tracked down a female Piazza fan, and she was a hottie. Unfortunately, when we went for a chat and introduced ourselves as the proud owners of this beautiful piece of machinery, she was immediately joined by her boyfriend who was parking his ute up the road. (Nice work buddy, send the missus out in the rain to leave a note on our bonnet.) Turns out that the unwelcome boyfriend owned a Holden Rodeo and had heard of people using Piazza turbos and intercoolers to extract a bit of extra grunt from the ute. Once again, Chris and I failed to fool anyone when we tried to keep up with his technical talk,


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‘Driving it is a dimension beyond pleasure.’ 171 but we gave his girlfriend a smile and a business card before apologising for our mechanical ineptitude and heading off to find the caravan park. We walked up to the reception desk to be greeted by a most unusual sight. The park manager had obviously, and unfortunately, undergone some recent and significant-looking brain surgery. His scalp was full of heavy black stitches, stretching from one side of his head to another, and this was in addition to bits of him being stitched up in various other places. Also, it looked suspiciously as if he was growing some horn-like features from his skull. Luckily for all involved the surgical procedure had in no way affected his ability to provide an excellent standard of service, and he promptly allocated us to a reasonably priced park cabin. The sad and sobering sight almost took on a comedic touch when the manager offered to come outside and direct us to our cabin then, upon feeling the rain he raced back inside before emerging with a clear plastic shower cap on his head, no doubt required to protect his stitches. Not easily put off our food, we completed the evening with an impressive pizza—which complemented a pie for breakfast and a kebab for lunch—and a quick stocktake of the Piazza owners we had located in Sydney. Unfortunately the stocktake didn’t take very long: strangely, it looked like we were going to struggle to find many Piazzas there despite it being the country’s biggest city. Thankfully it was a shortish five-hour drive from Taree to the New South Wales capital. We were greeted by the sight of the Harbour Bridge and the city behind it as we came in from the north, paying our toll as we drove down


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into the Harbour Tunnel. Speeding through the well-lit multilane carriageways made me feel like I was a player in a car racing computer game—but without the sparks flying from hitting other cars. Our principle aim for the afternoon was to reach our night’s accommodation at a friend’s unit in Randwick. We achieved this remarkably easily, proving to us that Sydney is a far easier traffic proposition than Brisbane. That night Joe and I opted for a quiet one. Our friend and former Tasmanian Treasury colleague, Hilary, had headed out for the night to leave us to beer, Chinese takeaway and capital city television viewing—a winning combination for any Piazza-searching duo. We were up early the next morning to head out to Campbelltown to meet our first father-and-son Piazza-owning combination. Campbelltown, we had been told, wasn’t a place for cars without the requisite mag wheels, fluffy dice and rear spoiler. Unfortunately, since our fluffy dice had been confiscated back in Western Australia, we had none of these things but we were willing to risk it anyway. In actual fact we were headed for a suburb out the back of Campbelltown. Here we found the small units and modest houses giving way to much larger and grander residences on large blocks of land. Father Keith and son Dave’s property was one of the large grand ones. The long paved driveway led us to an impressive house which, depending on where your allegiance lay, was either enhanced or devalued by the two silver Piazzas sitting out the front. For our money, Joe and I loved nothing more than to see multiple Piazzas in the one spot! Keith, a finance broker, was smartly dressed and munching on a piece of toast when we arrived. Son Dave was an


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engineering student. Both had a keen interest in cars. Dave used his Piazza to get to and from uni, while Keith had completely stripped his vehicle in order to get it ready for a spin around nearby Oran Park Raceway. Dave’s car was well-maintained and sounded reasonably healthy when he turned the key, but it was the racing machine we were really interested in. Keith’s silver rocket had been lightened by more than 150 kilos with the electronics, plush interior and airconditioning removed to improve the power to weight ratio. Given that Joe and I had done everything we could to add weight to our car to improve its handling, we could only imagine how temperamental Keith’s might be on the track. Although the engine was largely standard, Keith and Dave had chopped the exhaust so that, instead of the standard pipe at the back, Keith’s Piazza spat its noxious gases out just underneath the passenger-side door. Not that this would upset the passenger in any way, as all but the driver’s seat had been removed— it was strictly one at a time in the Piazza racing machine. The father–son racing combo laughed as they told us of all the wires that had been removed from the car—two large boxes worth. Then they confided that much of the tangle of insulated wires they’d pulled out didn’t actually go anywhere. This afforded Joe and I an opportunity to demonstrate that we are not completely clueless, as we in turn pointed out to them that the top-of-the-line Japanese model had even more flashing lights, switches and assorted doodads than the version that was imported to Australia, and as such many of these had simply been removed from the interior to try to lower the exorbitant price. All the wires that ran these gadgets had,


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however, remained under the bonnet, serving only to confuse anyone who tried to do their own repairs to the electronics of the car. Our trip out to Campbelltown also threw up a couple more surprises. We knew that Keith and Dave had a car each, but were unaware of what lurked in the backyard. Under a tangle of blackberries was a third Piazza. This one, however, was not going to get down the street, let alone around a racetrack, as it was clearly a spare-parts car, but it was a Piazza never the less and one more to notch up as we continued our quest to discover what had happened to the little-known coupe. The other surprise came when Keith opened up the garage door to reveal an HK Monaro sitting under a bunch of tools. Even those with only a cursory knowledge of Australia’s great motoring marque know that the HK is the Monaro that everyone wants, but for some reason Keith was extremely reticent to talk about it. Hope we haven’t blown your cover Keith. After listening to the dual Piazzas purring (or growling in the case of the racing car), it was time for Joe and I to show the fellas what Alyce was all about. With a tinge of embarrassment, I turned the key and Alyce sang her unmistakable low-pitched song. Since John from Cairns had pointed out just how loud our car was, we’d become more aware of it, but figured that the old girl was just running a little rough on account of the hard yards she’d put in recently. Dave and Keith, however, knew better. Within seconds of the din starting, Dave disappeared into the garage and returned with a wrench which he passed to his father.


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‘I’ll tighten up that dump valve for you if you like,’ said Keith, and was under the bonnet in a flash. A few cranks of the wrench and all of a sudden Alyce was sounding a million times better. We were extremely grateful that the fellas had been able to fix Alyce for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was getting downright embarrassing idling at traffic lights with her engine sounding like a large truck; secondly, we now knew what a dump valve looked like; and thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, when people asked if we’d had any trouble with Alyce during the trip, we could now say, ‘We had to get the master clutch cylinder replaced, and the dump valve came a bit loose, but other than that no worries,’ thereby giving the impression that we were not completely clueless. Despite our day with the Piazzas in Campbelltown, and our pact in Cairns to make every Piazza count, Chris and I were quickly running out of steam for Project Piazza Search, and it seemed Sydney was too. Despite a prominent article in the Sydney Morning Herald, which actually had Chris’s mobile phone number in it, we only received a single call, and it was from an English bloke who used to own an Isuzu Piazza years ago back in London. That night saw us switch accommodation, leaving Randwick, and heading to the northern Sydney suburb of Chatswood where another former Treasury colleague, Jason, resided. Before moving to Sydney, Jason had been my housemate for nearly six years at various locations around Hobart in varying standards and cleanliness of accommodation. Jason (together with his new housemate Kristie) now lived in a swanky apartment complex somewhat resembling a hotel which came complete with a massive games room, swimming


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pool and gym. Instead of a dip and a weights session we all opted for beers and ridiculously cheap steak at the nearby Chelsea Hotel. It turned into one of those nights where patrons stay a bit too long and end up enjoying drinks with kitchen and bar staff, and learn valuable things such as the father of the bloke who cooked your steak was once an accomplished soccer player with Rangers in the Scottish Premier League.


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‘The vision of it standing, aloof and alive, in your driveway.’

‘The vision of it standing, aloof and alive, in your driveway.’

With our motivation for all things Piazza running at an alltime low, we were very slow to rise the next morning. The lack of response to our quest in Sydney, coupled with the fact that we were running out of time, made us decide to hit the road once again. It was raining hard and the thought of leaving Sydney for the nation’s capital seemed to be slowing us down further. We eventually packed up the car and made our way onto the Hume Highway. Stopping to manually pay tolls seemed to be an extremely antiquated practice in the country’s biggest city in the 21st century but I found it slightly endearing all the same. From the Hume we turned left onto the Federal Highway for the drive south into Canberra. It was here that we saw 177


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the aftermath of a bus accident in which two people were killed. It was a sobering reminder of just how lucky Joe and I had been to date. Other than Joe drifting into the gravel on the side of the road at 125 km/h while looking at something other than the road ahead, and me neglecting to spot a herd of cattle at a similar speed, we had—touch wood—avoided adding ourselves, or anyone else, to the country’s road toll. The rain finally eased and we were able to enjoy the pastoral surroundings and a spectacular rainbow. The other spectacular sight was the Federal Highway itself—it was easily the best piece of road that we had driven to date (other than the road ringing Albert Lake in Melbourne which is sealed to Formula One standard). Ahhh, Canberra, just as miserable as I’d remembered it. You’d think a place with legalised pornography and liberal dope laws would be fantastic wouldn’t you. However, I’m pretty sure that these little perks are concessions to the people who have to live there. By people, I mean public servants, of course, and not your friendly, garden-variety public servants like Chris and I, who recognise that Government jobs are ideal for people who don’t really know what they want to do and aren’t going to give themselves ulcers by working long hours and weekends. The breed of public servant in Canberra is a particularly nasty variety: they know exactly what they are doing and spend long, long hours doing it. Obviously, with my fondness for the place I would have been quite happy to omit Canberra from the itinerary, but our research indicated that the Piazza was alive and well in and around our nation’s capital; and, after all, we are nothing if not thorough.


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‘The vision of it standing, aloof and alive, in your driveway.’ 179 But first we had to catch up with an old Tassie friend, Sandra, to abuse her hospitality. Sandra insisted that she wasn’t going to any trouble for us, but I had my doubts when we were told to sit on the couch and get stuck into the chips and Boags Premiums, which she’d had on ice, while she went about making dinner for us. Well, Sandra, if you insist it’s no trouble . . . After dinner (the best, and only, home-cooked meal we’d had in months), Chris, Sandra and I headed off to the Belgian Beer Bar to meet my friend and former co-worker Hilary. Hilary had recently turned to the dark side and become a Canberran public servant, and I felt it was the least I could do to buy her a drink. We quickly decided that it would be worth relocating to somewhere where the average price of a beverage was less than $9 and found ourselves a slightly cheaper venue down the road. Although certainly a lot more affordable than the previous place, the swanky little bar we relocated to was still a lot classier than most of the venues we’d drunk in over the preceeding weeks. I doubt they would have let us in wearing the thongs and t-shirts that had been our standard attire for such a long time. Over the muted techno, which was just loud enough to be really annoying, we chatted about our trip, life in Canberra and the future of electricity market reform . . . once a public servant, always a public servant. Amidst all the laughter and beers, it was almost possible to forget that we were in Canberra . . . almost. The following day, Joe and I woke up with sore heads, long after Sandra and her flatmate Gareth had gone to work. Thanks to our haste to leave Brisbane and our half-arsed efforts in Sydney, we were well and truly back on track to


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make it to Melbourne on time. First, however, there was the important matter of rounding up the Canberra Piazza fleet. I had been trying to chase up a Canberra lead for the past 24 hours but with no luck. We had received an email some time ago from a lady who said that her Canberra-based parents were long-time Piazza owners and would probably be keen to help us with our quest. Unfortunately, we were unable to get in touch with them and reluctant to hang about for any longer than we had to (you know how Joe feels about Canberra). So we decided we would continue our journey east, back towards the coast and the ocean-hugging Princes Highway, and aim to make it to Australia’s cheese capital, Bega, that night. While it was disappointing not to notch up a Piazza in the ACT, we were able to locate a couple just across the border in Queanbeyan. Stuart was the owner of Smash Palace Wreckers and had two Piazzas sitting in his yard. In his own words, Stuart had a problem. I remember a few years ago when I tried to offload my first car, my beloved yellow Escort, to a wreckers after a bit of a prang. Despite the fact that it was still running and most of the panels and the full interior were in pretty good nick, no one wanted it because ‘no one needs parts for the ’77’. In the end I managed to sell the little champion and with the proceeds bought Maccas for lunch and a carton of beer. That’s how wreckers work. They purchase cars when the parts are in demand. Stuart, however, didn’t operate like this. He purchased cars for his yard for the sole purpose of saving them from the crusher. Commendable, but not exactly financially sound.


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‘The vision of it standing, aloof and alive, in your driveway.’ 181 So while the two Piazzas in Stuart’s yard were a long way from being road worthy, they were also a long way from being recycled into beer cans, noble end that this would be. The quintessential Piazza owner, if there was such a thing, Stuart could have done all the work himself if he had chosen to salvage these beasts but, as with so many of his brethren, he had an inordinate number of other special projects simultaneously on the go. The defining features of this type of owner is that he a) will never complete all of them, and b) may never complete any of them. Joe and I have concluded that this dreamy quality is required to own a Piazza in the first place. I think each and every owner, us included, knew that we had a unique car. Most owners were aware of the Piazza’s poor press, its frustrating idiosyncrasies and its daft handling, but at the end of the day we all secretly loved the fact that we owned what others thought a lemon. In terms of success, accompanying sales and safety features, the Piazza probably is said fruit, but to we in the know it is a little turbo-charged quirky gem which we are proud to call our own. But rather than being a Piazza nut, Stuart was more like a Piazza foster parent, merely looking after these two less than pristine examples until he could find them a loving home. I couldn’t help but think, however, that as each day passed and the rust patches grew and grew, this was becoming less and less likely. Both cars needed a lot of work and rapidly oxidising panels weren’t going to make them any more attractive as a proposition to anyone. We let Stuart get back to work, as chatting about decaying old rust buckets wasn’t going to pay the bills, and hit the road once more.


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After reaching the Pacific Ocean at Batemans Bay, we turned right and headed down the coast. We could have been back in Melbourne in a matter of hours if we had left Canberra and continued on the interior route of the Hume Highway but we were on a mission: we were going to find some more bloody Piazzas! For as much as we may mock them, they’d found a way into our hearts and so we were off to see more of the little buggers in Tuross Heads, Bega and, on the other side of the Victorian border, Bairnsdale. Tuross Heads, not much more than 50 kilometres from Batemans Bay, was a beautiful beach hemmed in by cliffs. We had received an email from a Jill saying that she had recently taken delivery of a silver Piazza. In the new car world, ‘taken delivery’ usually means it has arrived in the showroom off the back of a car transporter. Taking delivery of a 1986 Piazza in 2005 probably means something similar, but with a smaller truck. Jill, however, had left us with neither a phone number nor a street address. You may have gathered by now that not a lot of actual searching, in the strictest sense of the word, went on during our quest. Unless, of course, you count our many and varied unplanned adventures as a result of complete and utter incompetence with a street directory. However, in Tuross Heads the ‘search’ bit of the Piazza Search began in earnest. We were on a genuine treasure hunt. And about as excited as Big Kev scrubbing Steve Waugh’s barbecue on Australia Day. (Incidently, like the Piazza, Big Kev was an underrated Australian icon of, quite literally, mammoth proportions and Chris and I were saddened to hear of his untimely passing just a few weeks after we finished Piazza Search.)


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‘The vision of it standing, aloof and alive, in your driveway.’ 183 The Piazzamail we’d received from Jill had a short message: ‘I live in Tuross Heads and I have a Piazza.’ We’d replied seeking further details but had received nothing in return. Judging by the size of the tiny dot on our map of the NSW coast, Chris and I estimated Tuross to be about as large as our collective motoring knowledge, so how hard could this be? However, upon reaching the crest of the hill that overlooked the not-so-small-after-all town, we became somewhat dismayed. Tuross wasn’t any sleepy beachside town. It was Summer Bay on steroids. It was time for our finely honed (though honed to what I’m not so sure) detective skills to come into play. Firstly, we considered the Piazza’s natural environment. Based on our extensive research, where were they most likely to be found? On blocks in the front yard? Maybe. On blocks in the backyard? Quite possibly. At a wreckers? Common sense dictates. Local mechanics? A good enough place to start as any. We did a lap of the town, and eventually stumbled across what looked to be the local petrol station/workshop. We spoke to a couple of the mechanics there. It didn’t look promising when, to begin with, we had to show them Alyce to explain just what the hell a Piazza was. ‘Nup, haven’t seen any of them around here,’ replied one. ‘Do you know Jill?’ I asked. ‘Nup, sorry mate, but feel free to come out the back and see if she’s in the phone book,’ said the other. Egads! His idea was so crazy, so out of left field, that it might just work! And it did. Turned out Jill was only one street away. We thanked our helpful mechanics and set off for the designated


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address. We couldn’t see a Piazza anywhere, but it was no doubt under wraps in the garage or out the back. ‘Hi, Jill?’ I asked when the front door was opened by a young woman surrounded by demanding infants. ‘Yes?’ ‘I’m Chris and this is Joe. We’re the stupid guys who are travelling around Australia looking for the Holden Piazza.’ ‘Oh, that sounds interesting.’ Seemed a strange response, but we plugged on regardless. ‘Yeah, well, we were just in the area and were wondering if you still had yours.’ ‘My what?’ ‘Your Piazza.’ ‘Can’t see a Piazza,’ Joe offered. (Yeah, right, thanks for that mate.) It was starting to seem like Jill didn’t in fact have a Piazza, she had never had a Piazza and, with enough kids to fill a Toyota Tarago, was never likely to need one. After a bit more confusion, a few dead ends and some awkward silences, we finally established that while Jill was not the proud owner of a Holden Piazza, Jill’s friend Faye was. Faye, in the absence of her own computer, had used Jill’s email account to get in contact with us and, praise be, Faye still had the said vehicle and happily lived just around the corner. Our arrival at Faye’s was heralded by raucous laughter—our own. Faye’s silver Piazza looked less like a Piazza and more like a dodgy Grade-7 metalwork class project. It was kitted out with a futuristic dashboard but there was hardly a panel left on the car, no windows, no seats, no interior (plush or otherwise), no wiring and no front and rear lights.


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‘The vision of it standing, aloof and alive, in your driveway.’ 185 From the small brick home on the hilltop appeared our very first female Piazza owner: in ugg-boots, ciggies in hand and looking more than a little miffed about being interrupted during ‘Days of Our Lives’. When she realised who we were, however, Faye’s demeanour lightened considerably. When we asked Faye why she hadn’t replied to our email, she explained that she and Jill had had a fight some time back and now refused to speak to each other. She also observed that, in light of this, it was generous of Jill to give us the correct directions. We could but only agree. As she sparked up another Freedom menthol which she’d retrieved from the seemingly endless supply in the pocket of her tight, faded jeans (I don’t think she was expecting company when Chris and I knocked on her door), Faye explained how she had seen the Piazza advertised and thought it might be just the thing for her and her son to do up. The Piazza had arrived under the cover of darkness, but she was happy with what she saw when she woke up the next day. It wasn’t until they realised how much of the car wasn’t working and how difficult parts were to locate as well as afford that they decided to change direction. Faye began to lament her decision to buy ‘the heap of junk’ and explained that her new plan of attack was to get the rusting wreck out of her driveway piece by piece. Faye’s son had a Gemini in the garage that he was doing up and was toying with the idea of putting the Piazza’s engine in it. They advertised what was left of the car. An enterprising young man arrived soon after with a trailer and went over it like a pack of rabid soldier ants, leaving only the emaciated skeleton we saw before us. The result was, to quote our fine host, ‘the shittiest Piazza you’ll ever see’. Joe


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and I confidently informed her that this was not the case and that we’d indeed seen far shittier examples just that morning, charitably omitting the fact that we’d seen them in a wreckers yard. Faye wasn’t sure if she should be excited or devastated when she saw Alyce parked across the road. ‘Oh wow, is that what they’re supposed to look like!’ she cried. ‘No, um, ours is just dirty . . . and a little lopsided,’ I responded. Faye insisted that we take Alyce to show her son who was working at the Tuross Heads’ club. Clubs seem to be a popular institution in this part of the world, providing loyal locals with a common place to meet and the convenience of a bottleshop, bar, pub, bistro and poker machines all in the one handy spot. We waited in the car park while Faye dragged her son (whom we’ll call Kevin to hide his identity . . . well, to hide the fact that we’ve forgotten his name anyway) away from his duties to show him Alyce. Kevin lacked his mother’s zest for our wacky scheme but muttered words of approval nonetheless when we lifted the bonnet. It’s funny how many people we met on the trip greeted us with ‘Show us what’s under the bonnet’. It’s equally strange that once the bonnet was opened, Joe and I still knew bugger all about what was under it. Now Faye’s son may be quite cluey about cars, and indeed may even know a thing or two about the mighty Piazza, but we weren’t convinced he was all that qualified to comment, given that his own vehicle was an old Mitsubishi Magna. A Magna that was sprayed completely pink. Hot pink.


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‘The vision of it standing, aloof and alive, in your driveway.’ 187

Preference for car colour aside, it was soon thank yous and good lucks all round and we were on our way down the coast again. The 95-kilometre drive along the Princes Highway from Tuross Heads to Bega takes in a number of national parks and state forests. One minute Alyce was scaling cloud-covered mountains and we were looking out the window at certain death if Joe had a lapse in concentration, and the next we were overlooking sandy coastlines and blue seas. Unlike some of our inland routes where the scenery seemed to stay the same forever, this part of the world kept throwing up an ever changing tapestry of postcards for us to look at. However, the windy mountain roads ensured that our average speed was a lot lower than on the dusty outback highways. Bega is renowned for its dairy cattle, dairies and the town’s biggest employer, the cheese factory, but on this particular night it was renowned for a dodgy hamburger, some beer and a good night’s rest in the form of a trusty caravan park cabin which afforded us the opportunity to catch up with the goings-on in Summer Bay and Erinsborough. The next morning we left an overcast Bega for the massive, long-haul, energy-sapping journey to North Bega. North Bega reminded us a lot of Bega, but with a slight northerly aspect to it. But we weren’t there for the geography. No, no, no. Believe it or not, we were in the cheese capital’s northern industrial sector because of our ever-present purpose—to see another Piazza. We were fortunate to have been contacted by Dot, an elderly lady who had read of our plight in a Sydney newspaper some months earlier. While a contemporary culture-loving, Piazza-driving grandma would have been a serious coup for


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our quest, it turned out Dot was but a conduit to the red Piazza her grandson Allan owned. Allan’s Piazza was sitting idle at Anthony’s Car Care, the local mechanical workshop, awaiting some major surgery. This particular Piazza takes the prize for being the most difficult example on the entire trip for us to gain access to. The proprietor listened to our request to see the car with a certain amount of suspicion, and indeed by the time we had convinced the man in charge that we were legit and grandma Dot really had given us the details, it felt like we had qualified for a $35 000 bank loan to buy a new Piazza outright. When we were eventually led through the workshop and out the back, we found Allan’s car was sitting exposed to the elements and looking somewhat naked without its bonnet and engine. This car wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. It transpired 19-year-old Allan hadn’t had his car long when he learned a tragic lesson in engine management— driving without oil is not a good idea. We knew from our Piazza pen pal Dot that Allan had since left Bega for the world of shiny boots and hazing that is the military academy in Canberra, but hadn’t lost the love for his car. Each armed forces payday he was sending back instalments to the workshop to get his Piazza back on the road. According to our proprietor though, in the months that Allan had been gone only one payment had been received and for that Allan had the engine removed and stripped. It was clear from the manager’s tone that that was all Allan was getting until more money changed hands. In fact things had got worse for Allan, because in stripping the engine it


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was revealed that it was probably beyond repair and that a replacement engine might be in order. ‘But, you know, where would you find a Piazza engine round here anyway?’ mused the proprietor. Joe and I looked at each other knowingly. The proprietor happily accepted Faye’s details and we were on our way, content in the knowledge that we might in some way be helping out one of our own in the Piazza brother (or sister) hood. The rest of the day was spent driving down the Princes Highway towards Bairnsdale in Victoria, purportedly home to the greatest Piazza per head of population ratio in the country. Cruising through the spectacular scenery towards Bairnsdale, our last port of call before reaching Melbourne, and ultimately the end of our journey in Hobart, I had plenty of time for a spot of naval gazing. As Chris steered Alyce through the mountainous terrain, I thought back on our previous three months on the road and all that had happened. I don’t just mean the travelling, the drinking and the wet t-shirt competitions; I’m talking about the change which, I realised for the first time, had occurred in me. Back when the Piazza Search was but a glimmer in my optimistic mate’s eye, I was pretty confident it was never going to get off the ground. But here we were, 20 000 kilometres later, having undertaken this most ludicrous of missions when ordinarily we would have been sitting at our respective desks daydreaming about tropical beaches and remote outback resorts. Rather than being content with the repetition of the 9 to 5 lifestyle (which admittedly had treated us both well up until then) we’d rolled the dice and decided ‘why the hell not?’ when Chris had come up with his original drunken idea.


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190 In Search of the Holden Piazza Although our quest wasn’t quite over, I thought back on the experiences of the past couple of months . . . of dusty, deserted highways, drunken nights in seaside tourists towns, strippers, Mormons and skilful surgeons saving old cars from the scrap heap, and made a decision then and there. As soon as possible after this adventure was completed I was pulling up stumps and moving with Danni to the big smoke to begin a new series of adventures that sitting in a cube farm in Hobart just couldn’t offer. While I was looking forward to getting back home, I knew that as soon as we rolled off the Spirit of Tasmania my feet would be itching again. I also knew that having endured three months of disagreements over broken televisions, vomit-covered shorts and manky feet in the cramped quarters of Alyce’s cockpit, my friendship with Chris would no doubt survive just as well with a few hundred kilometres between us. Actually, the sooner I put some distance between myself and Chris’s feet, the better. Joe was strangely quiet as we snaked our way through the countryside to our destination. Probably just thinking about breasts or something. Bairnsdale, only 34 kilometres from Lakes Entrance, is located on the Mitchell River flats and is the trading centre for the East Gippsland region. Joe and I were in town for three reasons, each starting with Holden Piazza. First things first though, we had to find a bed and some beer. We were driving slowly into the town’s main centre on the look-out for anything vaguely resembling a tourist information bureau when, lo and behold, we spotted a white Piazza parked across the road from us. In our entire journey this was the first Piazza we had come across in its natural habitat—or should that be its unnatural environment.


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A Piazza in good working order and on the road was a bit akin to spotting an eastern Australian lesser-known, hairynosed guava-eating giant echidna nestled amongst the angophoras. We were used to seeing Piazzas on blocks in backyards, or covered in blackberries, or gutted on someone’s front lawn, but rarely on the road. We set up camp and waited to see if its owner would emerge, but to no avail. Not being particularly patient men, and what with Joe needing to visit some ablution facilities, we left our details on the windscreen and went in search of a caravan park. The leafy and park-like surrounds of our chosen abode provided us with an opportunity for a spot of much needed exercise. I grabbed the football which I’d purchased in Port Augusta all those weeks ago from the boot of Alyce. Having a kick of the footy, making like we were the AFL’s greatest full forwards running away from imaginary full backs on implausible leads with the game in the balance and only seconds remaining, brought home a very important point: we were extremely unfit. Months of fast food, luke-warm roadhouse pies and premium Tasmanian beer had finally turned us from unfit tubby public servants in the prime of our lives into a couple of even less fit, tubbier public servants staring down the barrel of our physical twilight. With this knowledge firmly lodged in the forefronts of our minds, we returned to our park cabin dripping in sweat but with our appetites intact, and contemplated which of Bairnsdale’s fine fast-food outlets we would visit later that evening. Before we could indulge at the golden arches, though, we had some Piazza owners to meet. Since reading about our


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quest many months earlier, Kirsty has been one of our biggest supporters, kindly emailing and ringing us on many, many, many occasions to seek an update of our progress or to offer some assistance. Kirsty lived with her parents not far from the main road that runs through Bairnsdale. In addition, Kirsty had assembled her boyfriend Cam, also a Piazza owner, and friend Koby, yet another fan and owner of the mighty mobile. To be honest, it was kind of hard to work out who owned what. The first Piazza we spotted was an interesting two-tone white-on-black number and was located where we found all good Piazzas, lying idle in the backyard surrounded by long grass with little prospect of going anywhere soon. Not that it was expected to go anywhere. As we know, all good Piazza owners need a donor vehicle and this one had been bought for a steal from its former female owner and freighted down from Queensland. As the light was fading, we enquired as to a well-lit spot to take some photos of the examples that were drivable. ‘How about the Riviera?’ suggested Kirsty. How exotic! We drove the three working Piazzas out the main road towards Bairnsdale’s Riviera Car Wash. It was here that Cam began to detail all that he had done to the stereo of the well-preserved blue Piazza he and Kirsty drove. Joe and I probably know even less about car stereos than we do about the rest of an automobile. What I can tell you with some certainty is that Cam’s in-car sound system is by far the loudest thing I have ever had the pleasure of exposing my eardrums to. The boot was stacked full of


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woofers, sub-woofers and other assorted speakery things which, at volume, had the effect of shaking the car violently. ‘Close the door and windows so you can really feel it,’ Cam instructed. I was definitely ‘feeling it’ with them open and certainly didn’t need any further appreciation of what a bloody loud car stereo can do to your internal organs. I got out, shaking my head in a daze. ‘How was it in there? It sounded very loud out here,’ Joe observed. ‘What?’ Cam didn’t need us to tell him how loud it was—he needed official recognition. Which was exactly what he got a week later when he took out the Bairnsdale Autobarn ‘Sound-off’. Aside from an impressive sound system, Cam and Kirsty’s Piazza was reasonably standard but it also had a decentlooking set of alloy wheels. In fact, in the light of the car wash, with its shiny metallic blue paint and updated wheels, the Piazza appeared to have aged remarkably well for a car approaching 20 years of age. As is common with Piazza owners, our new friends had some equally interesting extracurricular activities outside of their passion for Holden’s finest dud. Cam had his unusually loud car stereo; Jonathon, from Perth, was trying to set a land speed record for a radio-controlled car; Spencer, of Adelaide, was into his model car powered by a ‘whipper snipper’ motor . . . and Joe and I, proud Piazza owners, like to pull out our guitars and write songs about our dietary habits. Maybe it’s because when owning a Piazza gets all too much, it’s nice to turn to stereos, model cars and guitars,


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which are easier to operate, cheaper to run and easier to find parts for. Blond-haired young skater punk Koby’s white Piazza looked to be in good condition, and while he said he was reasonably happy with it, apparently it just wasn’t enough. Like a number of other Piazzas we had encountered along the way, it was for sale. Koby wanted to buy a V8 Commodore so he could get that little bit extra. Joe and I wondered why so many people were willing to take any reasonable offer for their Piazzas. Was it the lack of parts, the difficulty of working on the complex engine set-ups, or the increasing likelihood that the expensive bits of them, like the turbo charger and the digital dash, were about to fail? Was it the fact that young owners found it near impossible to find affordable insurance cover? It may have been a combination of all these things. Though, to be fair, we had met owners who swore they were going to hold on to their beloved Piazzas forever . . . or at least until they turned 22 and were able to afford to upgrade. Whatever the reason for the high turnover of ownership, it was yet to affect Joe and I—as we neared the end of the journey we were becoming quite attached to our Alyce, more so now that she had nearly delivered us home some 20 000 kilometres later with our lives intact.


14

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‘Holden Piazza abounds with temptations.’

‘Holden Piazza abounds with temptations.’

The drive from Bairnsdale back to Melbourne took about three hours. I think both Joe and I were disappointed that the ‘touring’ part of the search was coming to an end. We had become quite proficient at arriving in unknown towns and hunting down accommodation and other necessities. Tonight, however, my accommodation was certain, I’d be staying with Scott in Port Melbourne while Joe reunited with Danni once again. The next couple of days were to be dedicated to attempting to meet with the last few owners whom we had been unable to see the first time round. Still, a Piazza Free Day meant an opportunity to catch up with some friends while Joe and 195


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Danni took the opportunity to converse/catch up without the need for a mobile phone. I headed for the Docklands Stadium to watch another game of our nation’s finest sport—St Kilda at home to Adelaide. The match was made all the more exciting by watching it with some rather drunk accountants I knew from home, who were in Melbourne for a national accounting seminar. The rest of the night, to the best of my recollection, involved some beer and a taxi. Our time back in Melbourne was also punctuated—and soundly deflated—by our first failure on the trip to successfully run the gauntlet of the dreaded parking inspector. Seems not much can get past Melbourne’s grey ghosts, not even in under three bloody minutes! Mentally adding the $50 to my South Australian speeding ticket and the anticipated invoices for driving through Victoria’s electronic tollway system without paying, I realised I would only be going back to work to earn money to keep paying off the trip. Oh well, guess that’s one way to keep the memories alive . . . After nearly three gruelling months and 21 000 kilometres, we were back in Melbourne. Not quite home, but just a quick boat ride away. Melbourne meant friends, close proximity to automotive experts should Alyce finally decide to top herself and, most importantly for me, a big, comfy queen-size bed that I didn’t have to get out of before midday. Actually, the best thing about our time in Melbourne was that my cohabitant was a whole lot more attractive, and a lot less stinky, than Mr Warr. While I’d been away on very important Piazza business, Danni had accepted a job in Melbourne and, because it was one of those lah-di-dah, private-sector type gigs, the company was putting her up in a comfy little unit in South


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‘Holden Piazza abounds with temptations.’ 197 Yarra. It was a step or two up from what Chris and I had been sharing on our journey. Airconditioning (not really all that necessary in Melbourne in late May but a luxury nonetheless), crystal-clear telly reception (including Foxtel), washing machine, comfy couch and fully equipped kitchen were all extravagances not normally found in caravans and cabins. Monday came around all too quickly. Just as I was settling in to watch Jerry Springer, my mobile buzzed to life. All my fears were confirmed when Warr’s name appeared on the screen. Shit. I knew I wasn’t here to watch telly all day but it had been worth a shot. Luckily for me Dave, our Piazza owner de jour was not too far away from Danni’s temporary digs in South Yarra. So by giving Chris some slightly dodgy directions, I’d have enough time to watch the end of Springer and probably most of ‘That 70’s Show’ as well. Eventually, however, Chris was on my palatial doorstep, Melways in hand, and we were off to find Dave and his proud beast. Pulling up outside the designated address our spirits dropped. Not having to pretend to know what we were talking about for a few days had rejuvenated us, but the sight of yet another Piazza sitting in the front yard, bonnet open, with a figure furiously rummaging around in the engine bay did not bode well. We got out of Alyce and introduced ourselves. Younger than Chris and I, but old enough to know better than to invest in a Piazza, Dave informed us that the Piazza was basically his little project because an accident where a car failed to give way was keeping him off his motorbike for a while. He then flashed us a grin, pulled up the leg of his jeans and revealed an unsightlylooking limb. Had Chris not eventually sought help from the Airlie Beach Pharmacy, I’m sure his festering foot would have


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198 In Search of the Holden Piazza given Dave’s leg a run for its money. Thanks, however, to some prescribed medication and the fact that late May in Melbourne meant that Chris had packed away the flip-flops for the remainder of the trip, Dave was unaware that he was not the only one among us with a deformed lower extremity. It seems that in trying to avoid the car that cut him off, Dave had collided with a telegraph pole, head first and, according to a witness, cartwheeled in mid-air before colliding with another telephone pole 5 metres away—barely touching the ground between them. ‘In all, I had bruising to the frontal lobe—I now go crazy with full moons, didn’t before—broke two fingers in my left hand, shattered the knuckle on my little finger—don’t have that knuckle anymore—and had to have metal rods inserted, cracked a right rib, collapsed my right lung and lost 40 per cent of my blood,’ Dave explained matter-of-factly. ‘My left leg caused me some trouble too. Most of the femur was shattered, broken and cracked, with 3 inches missing and/or disintegrated.’ Dave’s surgeon said it was one of the worst recoverable leg injuries he’d ever seen— and that’s pretty bad coming from a trauma surgeon at the Prince Alfred Hospital, which handles the most trauma cases in Melbourne. ‘Five years earlier I wouldn’t have a leg,’ Dave said. ‘I can’t recall how many stitches there were, but there were a few. Lots of staples too.’ Then he revealed his true anguish, ‘I lost my favourite pair of boxer shorts when they had to be cut off, ruined some good jeans and my helmet will never look the same again.’ Despite these and other setbacks, like having to learn to walk again, Dave wasn’t put off motorbike riding and by the time we found him and his Piazza he already had a new bike. I’m not


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‘Holden Piazza abounds with temptations.’ 199 sure why he needed a bike when his Piazza was in such good nick, but after all he’d been through I guess we shouldn’t have been too surprised if the bloke wasn’t thinking straight. Dave’s black Piazza was a relatively standard vehicle, but he had increased the boost to 17 pounds and, like some of our previous mates, had ‘three-and-a-half inches right through’. We congratulated him on his choice of turbo setting and exhaust and let him know that it seemed the way to go, although we’d left Alyce at 10 pounds and a standard exhaust set up, you know, to be on the safe side for our long journey. Wait a minute. Despite simply regurgitating what others had told us along the way, we were starting to sound like we knew what we were talking about. ‘Yeah, we just had to tighten up the dump valve and replace the master clutch cylinder along the way, but apart from that she’s been going great guns,’ I said, by this stage getting cocky and seeing how far I could push it. Luckily for me Dave didn’t ask me to point to the dump valve or the master cylinder so my ruse held up beautifully. But as soon as Dave started the engine, and we heard its low rumble through the massive exhaust we knew this was a Piazza to be reckoned with. We gladly accepted when Dave offered us a ride. The massive scar on his leg, however, should have served as a warning. Had he told us beforehand that he was not actually licensed, I think we may have paused. As for failing to notice that the car was not registered, well, I guess that’s entirely our own fault. (Don’t worry Dave, we’re only using first names in this book, just for you.) As he accelerated out of his driveway—and had I not been pinned back in my seat from the G-forces—I would have seriously


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200 In Search of the Holden Piazza contemplated opening the door and bailing out as Dave casually informed us this was his first time behind the wheel since losing his licence for speeding on his bike. Instead, I was forced to agree that, yeah, the cops were bastards for putting speed cameras on quiet highways at 2.00 a.m. Thankfully our thrill ride was pretty brief. We were thrown left, left, then right, left again, pinned back on a short straight, left once more and home. Dave agreed when we gently pointed out that driving in such a manner was sure to attract unwanted attention, and that maintaining a bike and Piazza was expensive enough without paying additional fines. I added some fatherly advice about responsible road use and cited my own stupidity in losing my licence some time ago for a drink driving offence (don’t do it kids!) but I’m pretty sure Dave just saw this for what it was: an attempt to get him to slow down. Either way, I was glad I’d donned the brown trousers that morning. Before we left Dave to rummage under the bonnet (although his car didn’t feel like it needed any more fine-tuning to us), he showed us the helmet that had stopped him from making an early exit from the land of the living. Although he admitted to being a bit reckless at times, Dave did impart to us the wisdom of forking out for decent headgear when riding a motorbike. Staying south of 170 km/h might also help a little, I thought to myself, but the man was obviously a diehard adrenaline junkie. After all, he’d bought a Piazza . . . the kid was all about horsepower. That night Scott and I ventured into St Kilda for a vegetarian meal. Just why I thought this token gesture to my body would miraculously undo all the damage I had


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‘Holden Piazza abounds with temptations.’ 201

done to it over the previous months I’m not sure—still, it didn’t seem to disagree with me. The remainder of the evening was spent in front of the television, recharging for the final stages of the quest. Next morning, as Chris and I strategised over the phone he made a passing comment along the lines of ‘only three to go’. I think we both had the same initial reaction of relief, followed almost instantly by something completely different. Sadness, regret, disappointment? I don’t think I can accurately describe how I felt. Just as the Vulcans have no word for love (although apparently Schwa’bisch is pretty close), I had no word to describe how I was feeling. Sure it would be great to get home, but in less than a week I’d be back in the job I’d desperately wanted to get away from and living in the town that seemed too small and would seem even smaller after three months travelling around this massive country. At least I’d be back in Murray, my six-cylinder, airconditioned chariot. But would that be enough? Shaking off the sudden feelings of sentimentality, Chris and I got back to the job at hand. We were off to see Steve. Steve’s house was in the eastern suburbs and relatively easy to find being not far from the major arterial route. Finding the front door on the street-corner residence was somewhat of a more difficult proposition. We knocked on what we thought would pass for the primary entrance and after some time it opened. Steve was a tall, balding fellow. He’d obviously done the sensible thing and shaved his head during the early stages of hair loss, and this made his age a little difficult to gauge. I think it would be safe to put him somewhere in the region of ‘the younger side of middle-aged’ (how’s that for diplomatic?).


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202 In Search of the Holden Piazza In stark contrast to Dave, Steve was calm, quiet and showed no signs of severe head trauma. No 17-pound turbo or massive exhausts here either; this shiny metallic blue Piazza looked like it had just rolled out of the showroom. Having been regularly serviced and meticulously cared for, Steve’s Piazza was as good an original example as we’d seen (bearing in mind we’d only seen two others still with their original owners). Although he spoke with pride about his Piazza, Steve indicated that this was simply because the car had been a faithful servant since he’d purchased it nearly 20 years ago. Chris and I had only encountered a couple of Piazza owners as conservative as Steve, and all had owned their cars from the beginning and never had a problem with them. Which lends a bit of credence to what the guys at Holden said about the way cars are tested by the motoring press. The owners we’d met who clearly hadn’t thrashed their cars like complete hoons were still happy with their purchase (or prize, in Cary’s case) almost two decades on. That’s one to you Holden. Steve was especially happy with his Piazza because he’d managed to get it at the time when Holden was registering and on-selling them to dealers as a way of getting rid of them at whatever price it could. Steve picked up a bargain and never looked back. But while he was fond of his reasonably unique little car, Steve was not ‘into it’ in the same way as Dave, Filipo, Franko or some of the other nuts we’d met along the way. Quite frankly I’m not entirely sure if Steve knew what to make of two blokes who had travelled around the country looking for these oddshaped Holdens and ended up on his front door step. Still, anyone who is prepared to interrupt their day to chat to a couple of


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‘Holden Piazza abounds with temptations.’ 203 clueless goons like us is a good bloke in our book (hey, whaddaya know, this is our book!). From Steve’s place, it was across town to North Balwyn. Luckily for us, most Piazza owners seem to have a fair bit of time on their hands and John proved to be no exception, claiming he was more than happy to wait when we found ourselves geographically challenged once more; and that was just getting out of Steve’s driveway . . . On approach to John’s place though we had a fair bit less trouble finding our way, as we were guided by a shining beacon in the form of a silver Piazza atop the hill. John was an older bloke with a cutting sense of humour and he wasted no time getting stuck into us for the less than pristine condition of our vehicle. But before either of us had a chance to defend our lady’s honour, we were invited in for a drink and a chat. As we sat in John’s well-appointed home surrounded by pictures of (presumably) his kids and grandkids, it was pretty clear that John was one of the breed that didn’t take his car too seriously. He’d done a bit of work to keep it going over the years and still drove it about the place, but it had never been garaged and he thought it was just about time to pass on the car to his son. After deciding we’d lounged about John’s home for long enough, we laid out our standard ‘Can we get a photo of you with the car John?’ so we could get outside. I’m sure John had plenty more chat in him but I was keen to move on. There was a complete cable TV set-up back at Danni’s apartment that sure wasn’t going to watch itself. So without further ado we set off in search of our next contender. Despite having not met him before, Chris and I had somehow managed to become a bit overly familiar with Tim,


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204 In Search of the Holden Piazza and indeed we had assigned him the Timmy J nickname without any good reason. Our preconceptions had a habit of getting us into hot water, and proved a particular source of disappointment when Faye from Tuross Heads turned out to be a middle-aged lady in ugg-boots rather than the tanned Glamazon we were expecting to meet. Joe, her name was Faye! How many Fayes do you think strut along catwalks in Milan? We arrived at Tim’s older-style home, set back off the road in a quiet, leafy suburb, and immediately identifiable by the shiny silver sentry parked out the front. Gee, did we get Timmy J all wrong. An imposing fella with jeans, boots and a t-shirt covering his large frame pottered around the garden with a young toddler in tow. Chris and I decided there and then to watch our manners around this bulky bloke with the biker-style goatee. Seems we were wrong again though (you think we’d learn) as Tim strode amiably across the lawn, offering a big smile and an outstretched hand, and greeted us with, ‘So, you’re the nut jobs driving about looking for these rust buckets’. Tim was yet another Piazza owner who’d received a bit of a metaphorical kick up the bum upon hearing about Piazza Search. Having had considerable problems with his Mitsubishi Magna, which included one memorable episode where, much to Tim’s embarrassment, a routine call to RACV resulted in four fire trucks and a police car having to evacuate half the street—apparently it was slowly leaking LPG—Tim decided to purchase the silver Piazza from a mate. Now Tim’s mate may or may not have clocked 196 km/h in the little road warrior and Tim may or may not have paid $4500 for the Piazza, but he was unwilling to


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‘Holden Piazza abounds with temptations.’ 205 confirm these allegations in order to protect his mate from the police and himself from his wife. Since purchase, the car had sat at his mother-in-law’s place for a number of years, and Tim had only decided to drag her out and get to work on her when he’d seen our ugly mugs in the newspaper. The result of his labours was the immaculately shiny little coupe in front of us. Apparently she’d seen better days but Tim was doing his best to restore this baby to its former glory. In fact, he had had it resprayed just days before and even had a few of the highly sought-after original decals ready to apply. However, the star of the show on this occasion was not Tim’s car, but his precocious young daughter who toddled up and announced quite openly to her embarrassed dad that she’d pooed herself. Tim apologised and ducked inside to take care of this emergency. He returned a few minutes later with a freshly changed daughter and a scale model of Giugiaro’s creation in his hand. ‘Thought you guys might be interested in this,’ he said as he passed the Piazza model to Chris. We certainly were, having tried to track down a scale model right across the country. We couldn’t believe we’d finally found one—at our second-last stop! As well as taking the mandatory photos of Tim’s Piazza, we also took a few snaps of the model perched atop a rock looking not unlike Richie Sambora in a film clip for a Bon Jovi power ballad. Although we were having a very entertaining chat with the big fella (I almost felt comfortable enough to call him Timmy J to his face by the end of it), we thanked Tim for his time and apologised that we had to rush off for media commitments. Before we did, however, we mentioned in passing that a couple


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206 In Search of the Holden Piazza of instruments on our dash weren’t working properly. Upon hearing this Tim asked us to open the bonnet, confident he could take care of it. Chris and I were a little apprehensive. We were genuinely running out of time and besides, in the past three months no one had been able to fix them, so why would this bloke with no real automotive skills have any chance. Still, we didn’t want to get the big fella angry so Chris duly popped the bonnet. After what seemed like five seconds of tinkering, Tim slammed down the bonnet and said, ‘Try that’. Well, tie me up and call me Susan. We now had a tacho and an annoying green turbo light. Nice work Tim. We sped off towards our first studio interview, and so fascinated by the extra lights on the already very busy dash was Chris that he almost crashed a number of times on the way to the Fox FM studios, but I must admit it did look like a Christmas tree dressed up for Mardi Gras so I’ll cut him some slack. Despite being seasoned media veterans by now, we were still pretty excited about the forthcoming interview. Our celebrity status thus far had only extended as far as phone interviews, but this time we were going to be interviewed in an actual studio!!! And, we were finally going to meet Judith and Pete, who had supported our search from the start and kept the Piazza flag flying. For those who are unaware of Pete and Judith’s work they are individually responsible for some of Australia’s finest comdey work. Judith as a cast member of the ABC’s hugely popular ‘The Late Show’, which famously brought Australia ‘Bargearse’, and Peter, who as well as being part of the Logie-winning variety show ‘Rove Live’, was instrumental in the development of ‘Bevan: The Musical’.


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‘Holden Piazza abounds with temptations.’ 207 After just making it to the Fox studios in time for our appointment, the receptionist asked us to take a seat, and indicated that the producer would be with us shortly. As the minutes passed, we looked at the elevator, waiting for the doors to open and Emma, the producer we’d been dealing with, to emerge. Eventually, a young lady alighted from the lift and walked towards us. Chris and I shot each other sly gleeful looks. Emma was absolutely stunning. She escorted us to the studio where Judith and Peter taped their show. Maybe it was their admirable commitment to seriously lame-arse causes that saw their show get axed just a couple of weeks later (if so, Jude and Pete, we apologise whole-heartedly for any role we had in its sad demise). Still, we did our bit; dazzled their (apparently waning, who knew?) audience with our hilarious repartee; posed with them for a few photos in front of Alyce; and headed on our merry way. Another day dawned, indeed our last, but before we could board the boat and make sail for our native island home, we had some unfinished business. More bloody Piazzas. We drove through the Melbourne suburbs for almost an hour to reach Rod Alford’s residence in a nice, new development away from the traffic and noise of the inner city. Once again, it was pretty hard to miss our target as not one but two shining beauties— a red and a black—sat in the driveway. Both Piazzas had been buffed to the point where, as we rounded the corner, the sun’s reflection on their gleaming bonnets almost blinded us. The only things shinier were the brand new four-wheel drives sitting in the driveways of the neighbouring houses. No mud on those tyres, and I got the impression that there was never likely to be.


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208 In Search of the Holden Piazza We had met Rod previously, way back at the start of our trip, during our meeting with Holden. So I knew for a fact that he wasn’t the Rob Halford, lead singer of glam metal rockers Judas Priest, as I’d first thought when I’d heard his name. But I must confess I was still secretly hoping that he’d greet us sporting a full black spandex with spiky cod-piece combo. No such luck. Er, thanks Joe. Rod and his wife Lynne, lovely folk, were the proud owners of ‘his and hers’ Piazzas, if you will. Rod’s was the red one; he’d had it for some time and had spent countless months restoring the car to as close to its original condition as possible. His hard work had certainly paid off and poor Alyce looked her shabbiest worst parked forlornly nearby. You could almost sense her embarrassment about the mud, the dust, the peeling sticker work and flapping gaffer tape that adorned her faded exterior. Rod had purchased the black one for a bargain off eBay quite recently. It was actually the same car I had looked into buying before we secured Alyce. You might recall I’d written to its previous owner and asked if the car would make it around Australia. And that he had written back with refreshing honesty saying that the engine was probably in need of a rebuild. This was enough to scare us off, but standing next to the immaculately presented car, listening to how little trouble the motor had caused Rod, I began to wonder if we had really made the right decision not to bid for it. I only hoped Alyce couldn’t read minds. Rod then went on to say how much trouble and expense the electronics had provided him of late. I turned back to our dusty Alyce and silently apologised to her for doubting her purchase.


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‘Holden Piazza abounds with temptations.’ 209 Having met Rod before and chatted about his cars, there wasn’t too much left to discuss on that front and we were quickly invited to stay for coffee and biscuits, once again proving that Piazza owners are among the most hospitable motorists in Australia. While Lynne went in to put the kettle on, Rod took us on a quick detour via his garage. Inside was a beautifully restored white FX Holden. Not content to have the two little projects outside to keep him busy, Rod had been pouring a fair bit of blood, sweat and tears into the classic motor in his garage. From the whitewall tyres to the spotless interior, the FX looked like it had just rolled off the production line. Rod admitted that the indicator lenses weren’t quite original spec, but from where Chris and I stood that really didn’t seem to detract from this amazing car. Once we’d finished admiring Rod’s FX, we were led to the lounge room for a drink and a snack. I gladly accepted a coffee, and Chris and I proceeded to attack the plate of Scotch Fingers placed before us. Apparently, both of us had opted for an extra few minutes in bed instead of a hearty breakfast that morning and Lynne’s hospitality was taken advantage of with relish. As we sat at the table in the modern, spacious home of these two keen supporters of our quest, Rod told us he was in fact the third generation of Alford to work at Holden. The display of memorabilia adorning his tidy lounge room indicated that not only did Rod have a red lion on his t-shirt, but there was Holden in his blood. Thankfully, rather than take us through every bit of miscellany that sat upon his mantelpiece, Rod and Lynne quizzed us about our journey and suggested marketing opportunities and world domination of the Piazza Search brand. Thanks for all the


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210 In Search of the Holden Piazza ideas guys, but one book and maybe a spot on brekky television are about as ambitious as we’re looking to get. Before Lynne started planning the Hollywood premiere of ‘Piazza Search: The Movie’ we suggested that it might be time to head outside for a few photos and then hit the road. Every possible combination of the four of us photographed with the three cars was undertaken, and armed with enough snaps to crash our website (which we did) we bade farewell to Team Alford and their matching Piazzas.


15

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‘“Inspired” is one of the few adequate descriptions of the Piazza.’

‘“Inspired” is one of the few adequate descriptions of the Piazza.’

That night, before we boarded the ferry and bade a sad farewell to Melbourne, two significant events occurred. First, Joe and I had a quick throw in the street of the Frisbee that we had bought back in South Australia, thereby upholding our vow to use everything in the car at least once (conveniently ignoring the fact that we hadn’t yet opened the packet of Family Assorted we had bought in Port Augusta). The second, and distinctly more poignant, moment occurred when Channel Nine started airing advertisements announcing the return of ‘Sale of the Century’ to the nation’s television screens, complete with footage of Cary Young reaching for his tie before hitting his buzzer. While we were disappointed that the show would 211


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be missing some of the original’s most attractive features— Tony Barber, Alyce Platt and of course the Piazza, which would not be in the gift shop this time around—it did feel as though we had come full circle in a way. We drove onto the ferry to the blank stares we were now so used to. I think it was at this point that Joe and I realised that it wasn’t we who were celebrities—minor or otherwise— it was Alyce who was the star attraction. People weren’t ogling the two slightly hirsute, tubby blokes sitting low in the contoured seats. It was the weird-looking red car with strange number plates, plastered in stickers and sporting a couple of fridge magnets on the roof that was drawing their attention. For a split second I resented Alyce for stealing the show, our show! I wondered if this was how Tony Barber felt each night as the studio audience and television viewers alike swooned over our car’s immaculate namesake. I soon snapped out of it and gave Alyce’s steering wheel a gentle tap in time with Crowded House as we drove slowly up the ramp. I was proud of her efforts, and she had indeed delivered us safely back home . . . assuming, of course, the ferry didn’t sink. I felt a little forlorn as we downed some beers in one of the ferry’s many bars, watching as Melbourne shrank from view and the waves around us increased. I was very happy to be going home, but it felt dreadful knowing that our quest was over and, worse still, I had to go back to work. A short trip to the on-board casino (read: small room full of poker machines) soon had me back in a chirpy mood—I won a cool $27. Never let it be said that I am not a deep thinker. We headed back to the bar to spend my winnings and whatever


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‘“Inspired” is one of the few adequate descriptions of the Piazza.’ 213

was left in our wallets just in time for the straws, serviettes and plastic cups to tumble to the floor as the ferry pounded into a massive wave. Bedtime. We awoke to be greeted by a dark and chilly Devonport. It wasn’t much of a welcoming but we were content all the same. After all, we had returned triumphant, and had brought back with us so much more than what we had left with: memories of a most wonderful journey, a greater understanding of this massive and diverse country of ours, the wisdom of an eclectic range of individuals who had taught us much, and a packet of Arnotts Family Assorted biscuits. Along with two impressive headaches, rather crusty feet and the knowledge that we still had another three hours to drive before we reached home in Hobart. So, this was the end of the search for the Holden Piazza. Although it hadn’t always been smooth sailing in our little red coupe, and we’d sometimes felt like we’d bitten off more than we could chew, we’d done it. Okay, so we hadn’t managed to track down every single Piazza that ever rolled off a ship into Australia, but we did find 44 of them; and we did find out that for every person who derided the car as a ludicrously expensive deathtrap, there was some mad bastard who was equally enamored with Holden’s least-known gem. All those motoring journalists who had given it such a bad wrap at the time clearly hadn’t travelled more than 20 000 kilometres in the space of two and half months, nor had they taken their demo model over every sort of road surface imaginable in all kinds of weather conditions. What qualified them to heap derision on the multicultural mastery of the Italian-designed,


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214 In Search of the Holden Piazza Japanese-made, Australian-marketed classic? Apart from their obvious motoring expertise of course. To my mind any doubts regarding the performance, handling and reliability of the Piazza had been well and truly put to rest. For me, the end of the search provided a mixture of relief and sadness. Immense relief that we had traversed the entire country without great incident, and with limbs and friendship intact, but a sadness that the carefree life of travel, beer and soapies was over. It was now time to return to work, and to grow up. Which, among other things, meant progressing the relationship with my girlfriend to the next level. It was time to show her my feet.


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Epilogue

‘Maybe the word isn’t “inspired”. Perhaps it’s genius.’ ‘Maybe the word isn’t ‘inspired’. Perhaps it’s genius.’

Since our return, the search for the Holden Piazza has not stopped. If anything it has gained momentum. An internet forum is now the home for all Piazza aficionados to share their stories, their problems, their photos and, most importantly, their prohibitively expensive unfulfilled dreams. News of our search has stretched beyond Australian shores with friendly folk from the United Kingdom, the United States and New Zealand letting us know about their Piazzas and accompanying experiences. While their Piazzas wear Isuzu badges, we warmly welcome them into the unique club of owners. While Joe and I have become passionate about Alyce to the extent that she is fun to drive and we are proud of her making it all the way around Australia, we cannot hold a torch to some 215


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of the owners out there and the enthusiasm with which they maintain and pamper their vehicles. Regardless of what our futures hold with Alyce, we are happy to know that we have, in some way, brought this diverse group of owners together. For now Alyce is enjoying a well-earned rest, a rest befitting one of Australia’s quirkiest motoring oddities—lying idle in the grass of my parents’ backyard. Despite getting drunk together on numerous occasions since our journey’s end, Joe and I have so far successfully resisted the temptation to go in search of our other favourite motoring anomaly, the 1987 Subaru Vortex. Though on an unrelated matter Joe still wants to track down Colette from ‘Ring My Bell’ fame.


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Appendix 1

Holden Piazza Technical Details Holden Piazza Technical Details

Technical specifications of the Holden Piazza are listed below. The authors would like to point out that they don’t understand what any of it means, but some of it does sound impressive.

Engine 4-cylinder, turbo-charged with: • Alloy head • Overhead camshaft • Bosch L Jetronic electronic fuel-injection system • Electronic ignition • Engine management system • Computer-controlled turbo-boost level 217


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• • • • • • • •

Intercooling of air between turbo-charger and engine Water cooling of turbo-charger bearings Oil cooler Bore—87 mm Stroke—82 mm Displacement—1.994 litres Compression Ratio—8.2:1 Power—110 kW

5-speed manual Gear Ratios 4-speed automatic Gear Ratios First 3.43:1 First 2.83:1 Second 1.86:1 Second 1.49:1 Third 1.36:1 Third 1.00:1 Fourth 1.00:1 Fourth 0.69:1 Fifth 0.78:1 Final Drive—Rear-wheel drive. Ratio 3.91:1. Limited slip differential with manual transmission. Suspension—Front: Independent double wishbone with progressive rate coil springs, gas pressure shock absorbers, stabiliser bar. Rear: Five-link system with progressive rate coil springs, gas pressure shock absorbers, stabiliser bar, soft ride anti-sway bar. Steering—Rack and pinion. Variable power assist. Brakes—Power assisted. Four-wheel disc, ventilated at front. Fuel—Unleaded petrol. Fuel tank capacity—58 litres. Fuel consumption—Manual: City, 10.5 litres/100 km (27 mpg); Highway, 7.8 litres/100 km (36 mpg). Automatic: City, 11/100 km (mpg); Highway, 7.8 litres/100 km (36 mpg).


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Holden Piazza Technical Details 219

Luggage Capacity—Rear seat up: 300 litres usable total. Rear seat down: 832 litres usable total. Dimensions—Length 4310 mm, width 1655 mm, height 1300 mm. Seating capacity—Four. Ground clearance—(at 4-passenger load) 155 mm. Estimated Kerb Weight—Manual, 1286 kg; Automatic, 1299 kg. Wheelbase—2440 mm. Track—Front: 1355 mm; Rear, 1380 mm. Turning radius—4.8 metres. Wheels and Tyres—6.0JJ x 14 alloy wheel radials. 195/60 R1485H steel-belted radials. Routine Service Intervals—1000 km, 5000 km, then every 10 000 km. GM-H 12/20 Warranty—Every Holden Piazza was covered by the GM-H New Vehicle Warranty which covered the vehicle for the first 12 months or 20 000 kilometres, whichever occurred first.


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Appendix 2

RACT Inspection Report RACT Inspection Report

• Headlights require re-aiming • Rear window wiper blade rubber insert is worn and requires replacement • Front windscreen wiper blade requires trimming to correct length • Front windscreen washer jet works intermittently during water sweep, suspect rubber hose is crimped during wiper operation • Bonnet driver’s side gas strut is weak in operation and requires re-gassing • Hydraulic clutch fluid is extremely low, requires top up • Brake fluid is discoloured and requires flushing and bleeding 220


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RACT Inspection Report 221

• Power-steering fluid is discoloured and overfull, requiring flushing and new fluid • Engine oil level is low, requiring top up; no sticker or service history is with vehicle • Recommend an engine oil and oil filter change is performed • Air cleaner element is dirty requiring service or replacement • Engine coolant concentration level is low requiring top up to meet manufacturer’s recommendations • Recommend engine cam shaft rubber drive belt is inspected for wear, oil contamination and replaced or adjusted as required • Rear passenger-side gas strut is missing • Luggage compartment light is inoperative, suspect globe fault • Passenger-side rear tyre is different brand, size and tread pattern to road tyres and also spare • Spare tyre requires inflating to correct pressure and resecuring in boot compartment • A manually operated heater tap has been fitted to heater system in engine bay • Front windscreen is stone peppered and scratched • Engine coolant leak is evident from lower radiator hose to water transfer tube and the underside area of alternator • Clutch slave cylinder is leaking fluid requiring overhaul or replacement • Exhaust leaks are evident from entry area into rear muffler assembly, rear resonator and exhaust tubing over differential housing • Recommend engine filter is inspected and replaced as required


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• Rust is evident to both driver’s and passenger sides inner sub-frame rail areas at the underside area of firewall • Rust is also evident to the underside area of battery and inner mudguard area; welding will be required to rectify • Oil leaks are evident to the rear of engine cylinder head and underside of the engine and gearbox areas; unable to locate the exact source of leaks; suspect rear area of rocker cover, sump gasket, gear selector rod and speedometer drive unit as possible causes • Oil dampness is evident at the underside area of the powersteering pump • Oil is also evident over power-steering rack assembly; suspect power-steering pump and possible power-steering rack top seal fault • Rear muffler assembly rubber mount is twisted and requires re-positioning • Excessive movement is evident in both steering rack inner tie rod assemblies, requiring replacement • Front disc brake pads are worn below serviceable limits requiring replacement, rear disc brake pads are low and will require replacement soon • Driver’s side front suspension block shock absorber lower mounting bolt requires re-tensioning • Gearbox rear rubber mounting is oil soaked, recommend replacement after leak rectification • Passenger-side front and rear tyres are worn below serviceable limits and require replacement, percentage of tread remaining on both driver’s side tyres is low and will soon require replacement


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RACT Inspection Report 223

• Some minor oil dampness is evident around outer flange area of driver’s side rear axle assembly • Some minor wear is evident to driver’s side front seat belt webbing • Engine tachometer is inoperative • Excessive movement is evident in driver’s side front suspension lower ball joint, requiring replacement • Wear is evident to rubber tubing and disconnected from rubber ducting at air flow meter to steel transfer hose, requiring reconnection to prevent unfiltered air entering engine • Passenger-side bonnet catch is missing • Both front door check straps are noisy in operation, wear is evident to driver’s side front check strap pivot pin, requiring replacement • Cruise control operation has not been checked due to damaged switch assembly • Instrument cluster volt meter is inoperative • Some drive line operational noise is evident on road test • Hand brake is not operational due to faulty hand-brake lever release button • Some wheel base variation is evident • Switch facia panel on left-hand side of instrument cluster is loose and requires adhering • Immobiliser switch operations is faulty and works intermittently, suspect as a result of worn socket and plunger assembly • Excessive play is evident in gear lever assembly and neutral gate, suspect an internal gearbox fault


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• Some minor wear is evident to front and rear suspension rubber bushes • Airconditioning fails to achieve a suitable cold temperature, recommend an airconditioning service is performed • Vehicle ride height is lower on the driver’s side • Front and rear suspension shock absorbers are soft and weak in operation • Engine exhaust gas emissions and electronic cylinder compressions are within specifications • A test was carried out for evidence of hydrocarbons in the engine cooling system, none were present


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Appendix 3

Australia’s Piazzas Australia’s Piazzas

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Moonah Auto Salvage Ours Nick Cary Aiden Leon Malcolm Rob Rob Troy Steve Chris Ian Marcus

white red silver red black blue black black black white white silver red white

Tas Tas Vic Vic Vic Vic Vic Vic Vic Vic Vic Vic Vic SA 225


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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Spencer Mark Jonathon Chris Phil Daryl John Fillipo Chris Darren Matt Ian Ian Franko Dave Keith Keith Stuart Stuart Faye Allan Cameron Kirsty Koby Dave Steve John Tim Rod Rod

silver blue silver white blue red blue white silver silver black red silver pearl silver silver blue blue silver silver red blue white white black blue silver silver red black

SA WA WA WA WA WA QLD QLD QLD QLD QLD QLD QLD QLD NSW NSW NSW NSW NSW NSW NSW Vic Vic Vic Vic Vic Vic Vic Vic Vic


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Appendix 4

Alliterated West Indian Test Cricketers Alliterated West Indian Test Cricketers

Barrington Browne Corey Collymore Cameron Cuffy David Dewdney George Gladstone Gerald Gomez George Grant Geoffrey Greenidge Gordon Greenidge Malcolm Marshall Patrick Patterson Ravindranath Rampaul Richie Richardson Sewdatt Shivnarine Sven Stayers 227

In Search Of The Holden Piazza

The Piazza

The Politics of the Piazza

The Piazza Tales

In Search of the Miraculous

In Search of the Sacred

In Search of the Dove

In Search of the Castaways

In Search of the Castaways

In Search Of The Castaways

In Search of the Dove

In Search of the Sacred

In Search of the Castaways

In Search Of The Castaways

Il Giovane Holden

Il Giovane Holden

Il Giovane Holden

In Search of Psi

In Search of Eden

In Search of Infinity

In Search Of Dreams

In Search of Adam

In Search of Infinity

In Search of Wonder

In Search of Satisfaction

In Search of Sustainability

In Search of Hospitality

In search of infinity

In Search of Amanda

In Search of Satisfaction

In Search Of Dreams

In Search Of The Holden Piazza

The Piazza

The Politics of the Piazza

The Piazza Tales

In Search of the Miraculous

In Search of the Sacred

In Search of the Dove

In Search of the Castaways

In Search of the Castaways

In Search Of The Castaways

In Search of the Dove

In Search of the Sacred

In Search of the Castaways

In Search Of The Castaways

Il Giovane Holden

Il Giovane Holden

Il Giovane Holden

In Search of Psi

In Search of Eden

In Search of Infinity

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