Adelaide in 1969: Watching the Moon landing, business booming, city expanding, Vietnam war and big change
Business was booming and the city was growing when the US put men on the moon. But it was all just a sign of further things to come.
It was as though the Moon landing had been specially laid on for us South Australian school students. It was 12.30pm when the lunar walk took place. We all trooped into the assembly hall at school to watch events unfold, a bit like a school lesson, on black and white television.
We were taught the standard curriculum of the era. There was English, maths, physics, chemistry, French, economics and history, a bit of music and a bit of art.
Latin was on the way out, and the hot new subject, biology, was introducing ecology and the environment, entirely new concepts to us matriculation students.
In maths, we still used slide rules and logarithmic tables.
Digital calculators were still too large and expensive to lug around school, and we would envy the pocket calculator of the 1970s. The school played football in winter and cricket and tennis in summer.
The standard school theatre production was a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta although we staged an end-of-year revue that year because there happened to be a few impertinent wits among us.
We ran a school newspaper with the help of Gillingham Press, in Currie St, city.
We trooped in to paste up the pages, with Letraset type carefully laid in for the headlines. There were some strong views expressed in the paper, because the political unrest of 1968 in the US and Europe had filtered down through the universities to reach the schools.
The war in Vietnam had fuelled the fire of radicalism in Adelaide, and the prospect of a lottery putting us in the Australian Army as national servicemen in just three years’ time was also pressing at the back of our minds. My oldest brother was already there.
Politician Ren DeGaris had a few of us over to Parliament House for tea to talk about our political futures.
After all, we had learned, our boys’ school, Prince Alfred College, and St Peters, supplied nearly all the state’s politicians and judges.
SA was a stratified, conservative state that had been pulled out of its agrarian roots by the radical conservative Tom Playford, and turned into an industrialised city with a rural rump by the time he threw in the towel, just four years earlier, in 1965.
We had grown up in an era of unbroken prosperity and rapid urban expansion.
It was an Anglo-Saxon city, peopled and run by Protestants and Catholics, and a few Lutherans.
The Establishment was still in charge, and most of the big companies were owned by South Australians, rich South Australians.
There was Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort, The Bank of Adelaide, Adelaide Brighton Cement, West End Brewery, Coca Cola Bottlers, Hardys, Michells wool processors, Simpsons, Lightburn, Dunlite, Adelaide Steamship, Amscol, Santos, Fauldings, newspapers, and radio and television stations.
It was an endless list of local companies which drove the employment and development in the city, working alongside the nationals, mainly BHP and the banks and the multinationals, mainly General Motors in Elizabeth and Chrysler at Tonsley Park. Chrysler had just pumped out its 250,000th Valiant.
The Establishment lived in stipulated leafy inner suburbs that ringed the east side of Adelaide, from Medindie to Unley Park.
The nouveau riche, the parvenus, and one or two very successful Greeks and Italians all lived in Springfield, so far as we knew. The city had been largely served by trams until 1958. Now it was considered too large for trams and the daily commute by car had begun.
The city now sprawled north and south through countless suburbs. Traffic jams were a new hazard, and Liberal politician Murray Hill’s Metropolitan Adelaide Transport Study (MATS) was a hot topic of the day.
The outer suburbs had strange new brand names like Paradise, Eden Hills, Happy Valley and Skye.
Outlying rural towns such as Reynella, Stirling and Salisbury were now suburbs. The city was full of cinemas. They were showing 2001: a Space Odyssey or Easy Rider, and my school bus route went from Kent Town through Rundle St to King William St, still years before the Mall.
Rundle St was exciting. The pavement overflowed with shoppers, because the city was the main shopping destination. The cars and buses crawled through the street.
On a rainy day it was like a scene from Blade Runner. There was the impression that nothing fit in what was known as the most brightly lit shopping street in the Southern Hemisphere. Yet department stores Myers, John Martins, Harris Scarfe, David Jones and Cox Foys were together to be found only there.
Like David Jones and Cox Foys, new lightweight “skyscrapers” of steel with glass and marble facades had begun to appear in the city ever since 1957, when the 12-storey MLC building was erected on Victoria Square.
Now new heights of 18 storeys were being achieved, such as the glass and marble clad Reserve Bank Building on the opposite side of the square. The city was losing its continuous alignments of wide footpath verandas that once kept sun and rain off pedestrians.
In 1969, this was a city about to change, big time. We had no idea that the other, technological revolution we witnessed putting men on the moon was, like a butterfly on the wing, going to up-end our analog world.
Tim Lloyd witnessed the moon landing at his school’s assembly hall in 1969. He has been a reporter at The Advertiser since 1974.