Words & Photos: Lindsay Saunders

Surely many thousands of Australians – at least those of a certain age – would have been brought home from hospital as newborns in a Holden.
Few, however, would now be the owners of that very car. But that’s the case for David Walsh, and the EK Holden Special you see on these pages.
The EK was bought new by his uncle Arthur Lundqvist in 1961 and got the job as mum-and-bub delivery service due to the impending delivery of another model of Holden.

“When I was born in 1964, Dad was working for GMH in quality control at the Pagewood plant in Sydney,” said David.

“Mum was 39 when I – her first and only child – was due. She’d been sick in the lead up to my birth, so Dad had a lot of time off. However, as the launch of the new EH Holden neared, he was so busy at work he didn’t have time off to bring us home from the hospital, so Uncle Arthur did.

“I came home from hospital in this car, in a bassinet on the back seat!”

The family moved to Brisbane when GMH opened the Acacia Ridge plant in 1966 and his father, a former airframe fitter who served with the RAAF during World War II in the UK during the Battle of Britain and then later from Darwin after the Japanese raids, was offered a promotion to run quality control at that plant.

“We’d go back to Sydney every year to visit family and I always looked forward to seeing the EK because I’ve always loved old stuff – not that it was that old back then in the 1970s,” said David. “I always thought it was cool because dad, as he worked for General Motors, always had a new Holden every year. The EK, being ‘old’, was cool.

“Arthur died in 1984 when I was 20 and we went to the funeral and afterwards went to my auntie’s house.

“I went down the backyard to the old fibro garage to look at the EK and my auntie came down and said ‘David, do you want to buy Arthur’s car?’

“I said, ‘I would Auntie Brida, but I didn’t think today was the day to bring it up. I was going to give you a call later and ask if you wanted to sell it.’
“She said, ‘He’d want you to have it’.

“I asked how much she’d like for it and she said $600. I remember thinking ‘wow!’ and telling my Dad, ‘she must be mad, she wants $600 for the EK!’ It was like a $50 car back then.

“But Dad said, ‘Well, yes, but it’s a really good one.’ So, I paid the $600 and drove it back from Sydney to Brisbane. And I’ve had it ever since – about 35 years.”

With the EK now home in Queensland, David decided to update the car to a degree.

“I resprayed it but in hindsight I shouldn’t have as there was some good paint on it. But I was of the mindset back then that if I was going to restore it then it had to be perfect,” he said.

“It had a few little dints and scrapes where Arthur had bumped doors or what have you, and two doors on one side were replacements from a wrecker as it had rolled down his driveway and peeled the two doors back.

“So it wasn’t pristine, but it had always been a garaged car and the interior was good.

“I did a full acrylic paint job on it back and put five-spoke Hustler wheels on it and twin carbs and headers on the original Grey motor.”

The car has been through a few tweaked stages during the years but has never strayed far from the original.

“I had the five-spoke wheels on it for a while and the hotted Grey motor. Then I went through a rockabilly stage and it had spats and spinner caps on it, that sort of stuff,” said David.

“It has been off the road too. There was about eight years where it sat in the garage in the late ‘90s after the original Grey blew up.

“But it’s always been a part of me and as my eldest daughter Candice was getting closer to getting her licence, I decided to get it back on the road. I got carried away and did a full rotisserie on it!”

The EK now has a Red motor in it, which was part of that major rebuild about 15 years ago.

“I decided to make it more reliable, so put a Red in it and a Trimatic auto – it was originally a manual,” said David.

“I put in an auto floor with a bigger tunnel and auto column, plus HR front and back rear ends. I didn’t bastardise anything and the way I’ve done it, it looks factory.”

A coachbuilder by trade, David, who is now a TAFE teacher, did virtually all of the work himself.

“The interior was original, but I’d bought other interiors over time and have a very good trimmer, so we cut parts out of the others into the original,” he said. “For instance, the driver’s seat piping was worn so we replaced that.

“The whole interior has been colour dyed too. I used DuPont vinyl paint. I pulled the whole interior out and went through process of scrubbing it with sugar soap and then Prepsol and went over it with a light Scotch Brite pad to dull the surface.

“Then I mixed down the paint very thin and first did the inserts as they’re a different colour. I had the paint mixed by Harts to match because where the vinyl wrapped around the door card you could see what the colour was from new as it had never been exposed to the elements.

“So, I did the inserts first, then I masked them and sprayed the outers. I took my time with it, misting coats on, letting it cure, then misting more coats so it is not hard like painted vinyl can be. I took about a week to do it.”

Even 15 years on, the results speak for themselves as the interior of the EK is incredible.

“I put the Red motor in, which I rebuilt, and it’s a great motor. In fact, if and when I take that engine out, I’ll never sell it,” said David.

“It’s got a genuine XU1 steel crank in it, Starfire rods, Yella Terra Bathurst 6000 head, hypereutectic pistons, a slightly bigger cam and I had XU carbies on it with the big air cleaner. I had a few tuning issues there though, so there’s a Holley on it at the moment, which I don’t love.

“It also has X2 headers, a Black motor electronic distributor from a VK Commodore, and the Trimatic behind it with a little shift kit. It goes all right.
“I’m running 3.08 diff gears on it in the HR housing so it’s not that exciting on acceleration but once you get on the highway, it’ll wind out the speedo if you want it to.

“I love surprising people. You can pull it back into second, nail it and see people’s faces drop and be like ‘what!?’.”

Does anyone know why Uncle Arthur chose pink?

“The colour is original but we’ve no idea why Arthur bought that colour. I know his family were pretty shocked when he got it,” said David with a laugh.
“The body is Pyramid Coral and the roof is Barrier Coral. The two times it’s been repainted it has been with the original colours. People ask, why I don’t paint it a different colour and I ask them what colour would look better?

“It’s the character of the car. If I painted it another colour it’d be just another EK.”

David said he will return the EK to a more original form under the bonnet at some stage but there were no plans to do so in the short term.

“I have a correct date code Grey motor in the shed that I’ll put in one day,” he said. “I’ll leave the Tri in it when I put the Grey in – you can get adapter kits for it – as Hydramatics are horrible!”

One thing that is certain, however, is that this EK is going nowhere.

“The car will never be sold. It’ll be passed on. Our oldest daughter Candice has her eye on it,” said David. “In fact, it was her wedding car and she styled the wedding based on it with the bridesmaids’ dresses and even the champagne the same pink!

“Our two eldest kids, Candice and Brandon, came home from hospital in it too. Unfortunately, our youngest, Bianca, didn’t as the car wasn’t on the road at the time. She came home in a VN HSV and she hates me for that! She did go to her school formal in it though.

“For years, the car was worth nothing and though it’s worth something now, I’ve got other cars that are worth a lot more these days. But if anyone asks which car means the most to me, I say it’s that little pink EK. It’s a sentimental attachment. It’s part of me.”

10 Oct 2019

Original source: Motor Trader Magazine (Oct 2019)