The 1974 "Tasman Bridge" Holden Monaro: A spooky Halloween themed #Blogpost

They say that history can be scarier than fiction, and I am one to belive that. Here’s an extra spooky story of a real life event that happened in my state, quite possibly the scariest one in Tasmania’s history.

There’s only a handful of people in the world that can truly say that their transmission have saved their lives. And I mean the sump on the bottom of your automatic transmission was the only thing stopping you from certain death by, say, falling 45 metres off a bridge. Two such people are Frank and Syliva Manley, and this is their story.

At around 9:30PM on the 5th of January 1975, the Tasman Bridge in Hobart, Tasmania was struck by the bulk carrier Lake Illawarra, causing a 128 metre long section of bridge to plummet 40 metres into the water below. 7 of the crew lost their lives by falling rubble.

While there were no traffic on that particular section of the bridge, there was light traffic travelling along it. One such car was a 1974 Holden Monaro GTS owned by Frank Manley, who had only owned it for a few months. He and his wife Sylvia were returning from a picnic, travelling from the western side to the east when they discovered something was wrong.

As we approached, it was a foggy night...there was no lights on the bridge at the time. We just thought there was an accident. We slowed down to about 40 km/h and I'm peering out the window, desperately looking to see the car...what was happening on the bridge. We couldn't see anything but we kept on travelling. The next thing, I said to Frank, "The bridge is gone!" And he just applied the brakes and we just sat there swinging. As we sat there, we couldn’t see anything in the water. All we could see was a big whirlpool of water and apparently the boat was sinking. So with that, we undid the car door and I hopped out. - Sylvia Manley

[Sylvia] said “The white line, the white line’s gone. Stop!" I just hit the brakes and I said “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t stop.” And next thing we just hung off the gap...when I swung the door open, I could see, more or less, see the water...and I just swung meself towards the back of the car and grabbed the headrest like that to pull myself around. There's a big automatic transmission pan underneath [the car] - that's what it balanced on. - Frank Manley

The other car contained Murray and Helen Ling, with their two children. As they were crossing the bridge, they witnessed two cars seemingly disappear, so he slammed on the brakes, stopping mere inches from the end of the bridge. A car travelling behind didn’t react so fast, causing the EK Holden to teeter on the edge of the bridge alongside the Monaro. Murray got his family out of the car and tried desperately to stop other cars on the bridge from driving straight off the edge, to almost no avail.

Horrorfied, he witnessed two cars plummet off the edge of the bridge after attempting to wave them down. Fortunately, he did stop a bus load full of people, which slammed into the side of the bridge as it skidded along the bridge. When all was said and done, 5 occupants of 4 cars had met their unforntate deaths off the Tasman Bridge.

First on the scene on the water were private vessels close to the bridge, responsible for saving a number of Lake Illawarra’s crew before the ship sunk, amidst falling rubble and live power cables. For close to 3 years the bridge was closed off for authorities to figure out what to do and how to rebuild the bridge. Travel times increased from a few mintues to hours queues lined up, waiting to board ferries to cross the river, while others travelled further up the river to a smaller bridge to cross the Derwent River.

Following the incident Frank Manley used the Monaro for daily driving, but he always knew it was no ordinary car. He vowed to never take it out of Tasmania, and over time it became an icon of Tasmanian motoring. He left it in storage for a number of years and brought it out only on special occasions, such as the 40th anniversary of the disaster in 2015. It now resides in the National Automobile Museum of Tasmania, where it sits proudly, unrestored and in mint factory condition, under a giant poster retelling its story.