White as a lighthouse and as well-maintained, with a striking red trim, Bailey’s Garage displays the name of Holden, even though the carmaker pulled out of the village decades ago.
Three years before Australia’s first Holden rolled off the assembly line in 1948, the Southwell family were selling Pontiacs, Buicks and Chevrolets for General Motors from their garage, which faced the Hume Highway.
“We clocked up 50 years in Australia before Holden did,” Craig Southwell, the third-generation owner, says. General Motors presented the family with a badge recognising the 50 years, only to close the dealership years later because they were not selling enough Holdens.
“We sold 156 cars in one year,” Southwell says. At the time Bailey’s Garage employed 13 mechanics and two spare parts people as well as family members.
“Dad used to go down every week to Sydney to pick up a new car. We would have to go down and drive them back in those days. They took the dealership off us in 1995 after we went 50 years. It was a shame, it was the little guys who did a lot of the stuff for Holden.”
Amplifying his sadness has been the loss of other car dealerships in bush towns. “Cootamundra, Yass, Crookwell, all these places had Holden dealers, the only dealer left in Yass is Toyota. There’s no [Holden] dealership in Crookwell,” Southwell says.
“It’s sad, we really liked the fact we sold Holdens. We weren’t making money out of it really, it was a nice thing to think, this is what we do.”
In the 1940s, when Frank Bailey who built the garage died, Southwell’s grandfather Vern, who owned a garage down the road at Dalton, brought the place and agreed to Mrs Bailey’s request not to change the name.
“You don’t need something with your own name on it, and it is easier for something to become an institution if it hasn’t got your name on it,” says Southwell. “We still get people ringing up asking for Mr Bailey.”
Years later Southwell decided he didn’t like the blocky letters added to the facade in the 1970s. “I put the paintwork back to the original. I went with what they had on the original letterhead.” He asked a local signwriter to reproduce images of old Holdens which adorn an exterior wall. People take photographs of it, and filmmakers ask him if they can use the front as a backdrop.
Bailey’s Garage once opened seven days a week. Even when it had closed for the day, people still managed to get hold of them to ask for petrol or mechanical help. More reliable these days, cars still run out of petrol after hours. And their drivers still have a remarkable knack of finding Craig Southwell.
“They seem to track you down, they ring you up at 4 o’clock in the morning saying why aren’t you open? Um, it’s 4am,” he says with a sigh.
His father Doug ran the NRMA depot for many years. “My dad would have to go out to all the accidents, there was no [police] rescue, the tow-truck guys got people out with the ambos and police all at the same time,” he said.
Southwell does not miss the highway which bypassed Gunning in 1995, nor the procession of heavy trucks.
“They would come through in the middle of the night, you would just see them thundering through town,” he says. “They would come through at 200 miles an hour. People couldn’t pull up because there was too much traffic. I reckon there are more people now because there is no traffic.”
Southwell did his mechanical apprenticeship at Bailey’s, and employs two other mechanics. Today electrical issues cause most breakdowns, due to all the computer-run devices in cars. Servicing cars for Gunning people sustains the garage.
“We also get quite a few people from Goulburn, some from Yass, a few from Canberra come out,” says Southwell. So why would someone drive from Canberra to Gunning for a car service?
“We don’t lie to them. I suppose we are cheaper,” he says. “The automotive game doesn’t have a real good reputation with what they do to people. We try to tell people exactly what is going on.”
After looking over a bill for a mechanical service in Canberra for a nurse visiting the village, Southwell said to her:
“One thing you want to ask them is why they are charging you for 5.5 litres of oil. Your car only holds 4.2 litres and they are charging $40 a litre for oil.”
Bits and pieces discarded over the years sit in corners of the big workshop, bringing in collectors who occasionally rifle through it all. Someone helped themselves years ago to the tops of the old bowsers on the footpaths.
He and his wife Sam run the school buses and employ four or five casual drivers. Fuel, oil and mechanical repairs are the core of the business and unlike most petrol outlets, Bailey’s does not sell soft drinks, milk, bread or lollies.
“It’s stuff we don’t need, because we are a garage and not a service station,” Southwell says with pride. “A service station doesn’t have a garage, in my opinion.”