1989 Holden Nova SLX LE

Mine was never this shiny, but it was red

Not long at all before my daughter was born, I was retrenched from my job.  This was in the midst of the height of the drama of the GFC, and after struggling to find decent work decided to make a fist of going back to uni and started doing an IT course online by correspondence.


My wife's sister had an upgrade to her car and my wife inherited the old - an old Holden Nova which are essentially just re-badged Corollas - similar vintage to the yellow car I found. It had QLD rego which was a bonus (cheaper), and was also quite reliable, but like the Corolla it was a dinged up ugly piece of shit.


Something had happened to the bonnet latch which meant instead of pulling a latch inside the car to open it, you had to pull the wire with a set of pliers while someone stood at the front end lifting the bonnet up simultaneously.  So it was not the ideal car to break down in, not that I suppose there is an ideal car to break down in.  You would look the part if you had broken down on the side of the road in one of my cars as opposed to say a Bentley though.


I also had some third party luck as my wife had bought her mums car - an old Falcon.  Same model as a Sydney cab, it had seen a few roads with 270,000 klms on the dial, but it was well serviced, going strong, and only $2,000 - a favorable purchase if you will.  My wife used this to drive to work and I used the less attractive Nova to run down the shops and back, and go to and from cricket in, which is all I
really needed it for.


It wasn't the type of car you would spend any great deal of money on to fix, the Nova, so it was agreed that on the next major malfunction it would have to go.  The only kind of dodgy thing about it, was that because the bonnet latch was a bit of a problem, when you were going quick, say on a motorway, the whole bonnet would shake and gave the impression it could fly up into the windshield at any time.  I found this very off putting.  It never did, and we got a whole year out of it.

When rego was due we decided to let it lapse, and buy a 'decent' car.  We tried unsuccessfully to sell it.  It just didn't have enough going for it to exchange it for any sum of cash.  Eventually the council 'stickered' it, and then my wife came home one evening to see it getting clawed onto the back of a tow truck.