I haven’t had so much fun with my thesis for ages! I spent half the day scanning articles into my computer at uni that I had photocopied from the Street Machine ‘archive vault’ yesterday. I am only do the most important articles and colour photos. When I have sorted them out a bit I will have to post some images. They are gold!!!
To give you a taste of the sort of thing I have been going through have a look at this quote from a Holden sales manager:
“Second hand vans are so scarce that if someone comes in here with a decent van as a trade-in we go mad and give him top price. In most cases a decent van will bring the same trade-in price as a Kingswood.”
Yep, the good ol’ Kinga. Classic.
The whole archive process and the freakin awesome material in these late 1970s magazines made me think of that classic Sabbath number, Time Machine, which would be my theme song for Panel Van, The Motion Picture:
Panel Van as nomad ‘time machine’ exploring the future-past virtuality of the smooth space produced by the liquified BFGs getting smoked by the worked 308, “Hold on back there honey! I’m gonna do some more donuts!”
But seriously, there is so much stuff in here. Why no one has bothered to examine the panel van subculture properly before is bloody amazing!! I am, like, reading this stuff and I simply can not believe it. Now is the time to strike because all the original guys are still alive (well, mostly, Brian Woodward unfortunately passed away). It would be the perfect honours thesis length project… or even a short post doc 🙂 that could be turned into an even easier book… and I am pretty bloody sure if you did it right, you would have a seller on your hands. But the thing is, van culture deserves to be engaged with in a proper and critical way. It captures a moment that can only be described as somewhere between the ‘1960s’ and the ‘1980s’. lol! That is an awesome title, Panel Vanning: Somewhere between the 1960s and the 1980s.