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EJ Holden

Would you take an unmodified Holden EJ on a 12,000-mile tour of Australia? The Editor did!

Most of the people undertaking a journey round Australia are young overseas backpackers: as we all know, Australians visit their own country last. And for most backpackers, Australian motoring means an eighties Falcon or Commodore station wagon. These tend to be sold on from one backpacker to the next, complete with camping gear and a couple of Dutch hitchhikers thrown in.

You know a backpacker's visa is about to expire when he washes his car: these vehicles are recognised by their extreme grubbiness, sagging suspension and uneven wear on the tyres. The last trait is due to the cars being driven continuously round Australia in an anti-clockwise direction.

Such bush-bashers aren't always cheap, despite the accessories included, but backpackers feel safer buying them from each other, being unfamiliar with the market and the terms used by Australian motoring enthusiasts. Terms like 'schooner', 'middie' and 'slab', for instance, as well as 'rego', 'pink slip' and 'RTA'. Incidentally, 'rta' is also an ancient Sanskrit word meaning 'cosmic order', which may explain how those parking tickets miraculously appear on your windscreen.

But I digress. Although originally planning to buy a $1000 'disposable' car for my own travels, while searching the classifieds my eye was drawn to advert for an original one-owner EJ Special Sedan, priced at $3800. Now most backpackers wouldn't know an HR from an FA (Whoops! Holden didn't make one of those, did they?), but being a motoring journo of some years' standing (and several more sitting down), I did.

I headed to Annandale and, to cut a long story short, ended up buying the oldest car I've ever owned, in the shape of the silver 1963 Holden EJ Special Sedan pictured here, for the longest road journey I've ever undertaken. Fortunately, not only was the car in the shape of an EJ, it actually was an EJ.

Most readers probably learnt about the EJ's lineage on their father's knee, so I won't go into too much detail. Orphans, however, might not know that the EJ arrived in 1962, the year that Rod Laver won Wimbledon and Neil Sedaka released 'Breaking Up is Hard to Do'. Holden engineers agreed with Neil, and decided to hang on to the good old 'grey' six-cylinder engine.

The EJ Special Sedan was one model up from the base Standard Sedan and originally cost £60 more at £1110 - yes, we're in the era of good old pounds, shillings, pence, miles and gallons here, back when service stations sold Standard and Super petrol instead of Magnum ice lollies.

My car began life in a dusky pink colour, which was not the buyers' first choice, but taking a showroom car back then was preferable to waiting weeks for delivery of the preferred colour. The old couple who had cherished the car from new finally had it bare-metal resprayed at the end of 1993.

On the face of it, a car with no fan, a low-geared three-speed manual gearbox and a measly 9 1/2 gallon tank wouldn't seem to be the perfect vehicle to tackle Australia's huge, hot, empty spaces. Was this really the car built for Australian conditions?

I doubt the old couple really believed I was intending to drive their car on a 12,000-mile tour round Australia; I was having second thoughts myself when shook the car down around Sydney, as it seemed unhappy at much above 45mph. I put this down to too much town driving in the past - the engine loosened up as I progressed north. Once past a rather bad body resonance at around 55mph, the EJ cruised quite happily at 60-65mph, although fuel consumption of 20mpg would leave any driver wishing for a fourth gear.

In fact, aside from the general 100kph (62mph!) speed limit, suicidal marsupials and other natural hazards make it inadvisable to drive much faster. When the car was current, it would definitely have been out of the question - Highway 1 was in much worse condition.

So with my mental attitude adjusted to the speed of the car, I headed up the Pacific Highway.

First stop was Forster-Tuncurry and Allen Curtis's impressive private transport collection (ACCM, March 1996), plus a spin up to Barrington Tops National Park.

National park usually implies gravel road: the EJ's natural environment. Tyre adhesion obviously suffers, but it is on these roads that the handling characteristics of a car become apparent: the EJ rolls like a humpback whale but proves to be remarkably neutral, the back end sliding out in a leisurely, controllable fashion when corners are taken too hard or surface corrugations send the rear bouncing sideways. Rather tired rear suspension and rubber bushes and mountings throughout don't help matters and make the ride noisier, too, but the EJ takes bad road surfaces into its stride. Good ground clearance of over 7in (when the car was new, at least) is a bonus.

Thence to Bellingen, just inland from Coffs Harbour, where destiny awaited in the shape of my first EJ parking ticket.

After a spell in Byron Bay I headed through the border mountains to Mount Tambourine in Queensland, for stunning views east over the white scar of the Gold Coast. The EJ tackles mountain roads in a leisurely manner. The gearchange is slow and first lacks synchro, but the steering is light enough; the turning circle is 36 1/2ft and the big plastic-covered wheel makes for easy lock-to-lock winding, while not wandering too much on the straights. The understressed six also comes into its own on the climbs, its 120lb ft maximum torque arriving at only 1400rpm. This car can climb all day at 30mph in top, and sound very sweet doing it.

Coming down the mountain, it's useful to remember that the EJ was the first Holden to employ a brake booster, and the drums give initial performance well up to modern standards: ie, grossly over-assisted and liable to lock up all the wheels of this 2500lb vehicle if the pedal is pressed anything more than gingerly. The EJ was also the first Holden to offer front seat-belt anchorages...

In Brisbane the EJ got the first of many oil changes and lubes. The suspension has a 500-mile lubrication interval and more regreasing points than you can shake a grease gun at.

With the temperature rising steadily as I advanced northwards, I was beginning to regret the lack of cabin cooling beyond inverting the quarterlights - but I guess it forces you to acclimatise. The EJ needed regular topping up with water (antifreeze? What's that?) but otherwise didn't miss a beat all the way up to Cape Tribulation. Heading back down the coast to Townsville, however, the radiator well and truly clogged itself, necessitating a stop in Ingham where it was flushed and rebuilt on the spot in two hours. That really sums up the 'fixability' of old Holdens.

From Townsville it was the long slog over to Katherine, averaging about 650km a day at a maximum of 100kph. An uneventful trip in every way but good to do once in your life. North of Katherine I suffered a front wheel blowout at 100kph, but I'm pleased to say the EJ carried on in a straight line. With two new front tyres I headed into Kakadu (it was the Dry season) and from there to Darwin. Easy. And from that point, the only thing left to do was head back to Sydney, this time via the Stuart Highway.

The only way to relieve the boredom of the unrelenting scrub on this road is count the shredded tyres at the side of the road to see if they outnumber the dead kangaroos. I sank slowly into the Elascofab bench seat and tried to stay awake.

From Alice Springs, confident about EJ's robustness, I had no hesitation in tackling the Mereenie loop road to Kings Canyon. 300km of sand and rocks? No worries. Although the road hasn't been open that long it is in pretty bad condition and I did lose another tyre. By this stage the gearbox had also begun to jump out of third and got progressively worse - all the way back to Sydney! From Uluru, Coober Pedy and Port Augusta it was all plain sailing through Adelaide (naturally with a detour to the Birdwood collection) and on to Melbourne on the Great Ocean Road, and then back to Sydney, three months after I left.

In Sydney the EJ was finally awarded its new gearbox (which a Morris Minor specialist happened to have sitting around) and was re-registered without drama. All ready for a trip to WA!

And why not? The EJ was built for such journeys, and road conditions (if not driving standards) have improved enormously in the last 30 years. The EJ's simplicity and sturdiness are the keys; remember that the engine doesn't even have an oil filter, which fact never stopped them clocking up a reliable 100,000 miles between rebuilds. That's why there are still one-owner EJs out there, in daily use.

Jonathan Empson