In WA, yes and no. We got alot of gray market second hand cars being sold by car dealers in the early 90's until some law was passed making it harder to import them, as the new car yards were crying foul. Not sure if that happened in the rest of the country.
So no it wasn't uncommon to see JDM only models cruising the streets of Perth back then, there were boat loads of JDM RX-7's, Cordia Turbos, Fairlady Z's and the odd C210 GT2000 turbo Skylines, and lots of R30's shipped over.
These days though, yep. Most of them ended up as scrap metal after they were used and abused.