Roller Door

The corrugated roller doors in this photograph once sealed off service bays at the Smith Street workshop in Chatswood, the mechanical and repair arm of Sundell Holden's North Shore dealer network. By 2015, every surface in the building had been claimed by graffiti, applied in layers thick enough to obscure whatever the walls looked like underneath. Steel roof purlins run overhead. The concrete floor is cracked and scattered with debris. A danger sign remains bolted to a painted structural column, still doing its job in an empty room. Sundell Motors Pty Ltd held Holden dealer code 610 for Chatswood and operated across multiple Sydney locations, with confirmed entities at Chatswood and Pittwater. The Smith Street site functioned as the network's primary workshop and service centre, separate from the company's Pacific Highway showroom, which was cleared in 1987 for the construction of the Zenith Centre office complex. Sundell Motors Chatswood Pty Ltd was registered with ASIC on 5 January 1967 and, after a series of consolidations, became Sundell Motors Pty Ltd on 3 September 2018. The building was already vacant and heavily tagged when it was photographed in 2015. General Motors announced the withdrawal of the Holden brand from Australia on 17 February 2020. The ACCC intervened in May that year after dealers raised concerns about compensation timelines, and a Senate committee inquiry documented the imbalance in bargaining power between Holden and its 185-strong dealer network. Total compensation across the network came to close to $150 million. The Holden brand ceased trading in Australia on 31 December 2020. Willoughby City Council approved a development application for a five-storey Woolworths complex at 17 Smith Street in March 2021, following more than 700 public submissions, most of them opposed. The workshop was demolished around that time. Woolworths Chatswood East opened on 26 October 2022. This photograph records what the building held in the interval between those two lives.