Mario Kontelj is 75 and lives in Bell Post Hill, Geelong. The house that he shares with his wife Ivanka is the house that Ford built; Kontelj worked hard at the car factory for 29 years while raising his three children and making a go of it as a first-wave migrant.
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He and his wife came from Slovenia in the 1950s straight to the Snowy Mountain scheme in New South Wales where he started as a labourer and she as a cook until Kontelj became a fitter, making mechanical parts. It was a trade he brought to Geelong in 1960.
''Ford was the only one who had a job,'' he says. He also doorknocked a wire factory and a tractor factory, but Ford gave him a go. ''Two weeks or some bloody thing they said to me, they put me on a trial, and slowly I worked there two weeks and passed the trial and worked for a few months and then it was years.''
When he started at Ford Geelong the Broadmeadows plant had just opened and all-Australian XK Falcons were being pushed out the doors. Soon enough the Geelong plant would be expanded away from an assembly line into a massively expanded manufacturing plant while assembly work at Fremantle stopped.
In these Victorian boomtimes as many as 8000 people were employed at Geelong alone. Many of the Geelong workers transferred to Broadmeadows, did a few years there, then came back.
The XM, XP and XR Falcons were released during the swinging 1960s. Mario Kontelj was not only making a go of it as a migrant, he was thriving.
''The place improved and got bigger and bigger and I became floor superintendent in the press shop then I was leading hand then I was senior supervisor. I did day shift to afternoon shift to late shift to afternoon and back to day and afternoon again. That's the way they shifted me around through promotions. It was a good place to work. It was my first job in Geelong and my last job in Geelong.''
He finished in the late 1980s as a foreman across several work floors - just as power steering and disc brakes on Falcon cars were being introduced and as the EA and Ford Capri convertible were being made. He started at the bottom and got to the top of his field.
''They said to me 'we want you to be foreman' and I say 'I don't know, my English not so good, my language is OK but the writing and all that …' They said 'We don't care. We need someone who can do the job'.''
Yesterday, asked how he felt to know that the company which gave him so much had after 90 years decided to stop making cars in Australia, Kontelj said: ''There is nothing I can do. What I can do? It is over.''
Across Melbourne in Broadmeadows the landmark oval blue Ford sign on the road to Sydney now symbolises not manufacturing as a cornerstone of the economy, but death and decay.
At the sprawling Ford car plant on Sydney Road, there was a funereal air. Ford Australia president Bob Graziano announced that the American giant had decided to stop making cars in this country at a cost of 1200 jobs in Broadmeadows and Geelong, two areas that need them most.
Many of the workers at the two plants are long-serving employees, such as Stewart Harris, who has worked on the Broadmeadows line for 23 years.
Standing in the biting wind in his green fluoro Ford top, he told of the high emotion when workers at the plant came together to hear the news, delivered by Graziano.
"I'm still in shock," Harris explained. "It's not easy to absorb something like this. It's a sad day for people who work for this company but also this country." Harris, 42, is the father of two young children. His job on the assembly line is over from 2016.
Broadmeadows Labor MP Frank McGuire, himself a Broady boy and long-time champion for the area, was at the plant near Harris and was clearly shaken by the news. "This rips the guts out of Broady," he said. Ford had been in Broadmeadows for half a century, he said. It had been a key employer, with "row upon row of pastel coloured houses" for the workforce.
"This is what's driven the economy and underwritten the prosperity of the rest of the state," he said. "Today marks the end of an era that has been incredibly vital for this community."
Even the big boss struck a sombre figure as he explained how the decision had only been taken on Wednesday night. Ford executives had crunched the numbers but, Graziano said, "we still couldn't get it to box''.
Ford Australia had incurred a loss for 2012 of $141 million, and combined losses of $600 million over five years. Ford looked at export opportunities. "But we were still faced with the fact that our cost structure in Australia remained uncompetitive," he said. "Our costs are double that of Europe, and nearly four times (more than) in Asia. The business case simply did not stack up, leading us to the conclusion that manufacturing is not viable for Ford in Australia in the long term."
The Ford chief said there had been a drop in large car sales, and a more competitive market with 365 other models on the market. To questioning about the hundreds of millions of state and federal government assistance poured into Ford, Graziano claimed that for every dollar of government money Ford had returned $6 to the economy through investment or tax.
Ford remains in Australia even if its cars will be made by overseas workers. But there is one iconic Ford brand that will disappear, with the Falcon nameplate being retired along with workers in Broadmeadows and Geelong in 2016.
Back in Geelong, identifiable for so long with the company and its insignia as well as the livelihoods it has supported, Bob Merriman blamed the old economic and manufacturing spectre of protectionism - or lack of it - for undoing Ford in Australia.
Merriman, 78, was born in Geelong. He is a former chairman of Cricket Australia, a former industrial relations commissioner and former mayor of Queenscliff. His father started at Ford Geelong in 1925 helping make Model T cars. Merriman himself worked there from the 1950s until 1980, working his way up into management. His sons and also his daughter have also worked at Ford Geelong.
''This has been inevitable since the change in political philosophy toward protectionism,'' he said.
What he means is that when locally made goods and local labour are made to compete in a free global market against imports - even those deemed special - there can be a cost. ''Once the vehicle industry ceased to have protection it has not been on a level playing field at all.''
He said the dismantling of protectionism for the once-hallowed Australian car industry started with the Whitlam federal government in 1972 through reduced tariffs and continued through the Fraser and Hawke governments. ''The death warrants were signed long ago,'' he said. ''It has been a slow terrible death.''
