How Melbourne celebrated Christmas in the 1980s
Christmas in Melbourne was, as always, a big deal in Melbourne — but in the electronic age, things started to look a little different. This is how Victorians celebrated the festive season in the 1980s.
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Christmas in Melbourne was, as always, a big deal in Melbourne, but in the electronic age, things started to look a little different.
The glow of coloured lights and bunting zigzagging over in the main streets of our suburbs and towns began to fade, replace by council-approved tinsel and plastic decorations that never seemed to even come close to those earlier splashes of festive spirit.
But this was the beginning of the electronic age, and some homeowners began to amass more and more elaborate home decorations to ring in some Christmas cheer.
HOW WE DID CHRISTMAS IN 1960S MELBOURNE
HOW POST-WAR MELBOURNE CELEBRATED CHRISTMAS
After all, electricity generation and transmission was still government owned, and it was more affordable, even if power strikes caused the occasional brownout in Victoria.
The switch from CBD shopping to suburban malls was almost complete.
By the 1980s, Melbourne was a city with a dead heart — a central business district that only jumped during business hours, which by then included trading until 9pm on Thursday and Friday and Saturday mornings.
Before 1987, shops still closed at 1pm on Saturday and would not open again until Monday morning.
This caused an almighty rush in shopping centres all over the state.
Suburban shopping malls were going from strength to strength. Box Hill Central swallowed both Box Hill railway station and the much smaller Whitehorse Plaza centre in 1984.
Werribee Plaza followed in 1985 and Dandenong Plaza opened its doors.
Meanwhile, the Waltons department store chain disappeared in Victoria in 1983 and nationally four years later.
Buckley & Nunn, a mainstay of CBD trading since 1851, was bought out by David Jones in 1982.
Coles Variety Stores, including its iconic shop in Bourke Street, opposite David Jones, closed in 1987.
There were efforts to revitalise CBD trading, though
Check out this advertisement for The Walk — a jazzy bid to drag shoppers back to Melbourne’s heart in 1980.
Traffic was banned from Bourke St, between Swanston and Elizabeth streets, in the late 1970s but work to beautify the Bourke St Mall began in 1983.
By the end of the decade, the closure of Swanston St and the creation of Swanston Walk was on the cards along with the massive Daimaru/Melbourne Central project.
It wasn’t all bad news, though. The Myer Christmas windows were attracting a new generation of admirers by the 1980s, with displays becoming so elaborate that the task of designing and constructing them was taken from the retail giant’s window dressers and handed to external contractors for the first time in 1983.
Myer’s Christmas parade, a popular launch for the Christmas windows, went from strength to strength in the 1980s, but the rooftop carnival faded away by the time the 1990s dawned.
Here’s a glimpse of the 1981 Myer Christmas parade.
By the mid-’80s, Coles Myer had joined forces for an onslaught to win the hearts and minds of Christmas shoppers, as this advertisement suggests.
Over at Woolworths, Big W was embarking on a brass-led push for retail success in the greed-is-good era, trying to outdo Copperart at its own game without the aid of ambassador extraordinaire Pete Smith with on a 10-year-old Santa to reel in the punters.
Big W is still around but Copperart is long gone. Make of that what you will.
For kids and big kids alike, Christmas in the 1980s meant electronics and toy crazes.
Cabbage Patch Kids are making a bit of a comeback with the Baby So Real range this year.
Back in 1984, Cabbage Patch Kids were the toy every little girl (and quite a few boys) wanted, only genuine if they had a birth certificate with the doll’s name and the inventor Xavier Roberts’ signature on their bums.
The soft vinyl-faced, big-eyed, textile-bodied dolls were an instant hit.
ABC News recently shared a piece from its Antenna program, aired in May 1984, that shows the birthing of a Cabbage Patch Kid for a little girl and attempts to explain why the cutesy dolls were so overwhelmingly popular.
Around the same time, the Rubik’s cube created big sales around the world speed competitions to unscramble the mind-bending puzzles.
Transformers had their first flush of success in toy shops in the 1980s. It was also the era of that evergreen quiz-based board game, Trivial Pursuit.
At the dawn of the decade, the Atari landed but more basic games like Space Invaders and Pong gave way to the rise of Pacman and his female alter ego, Ms Pacman (feminism was by now a reality).
There was a seismic shift in the world of personal technology as electronics became more sophisticated.
The record player was still the leading form of recorded music in 1980 but many stereos included cassette players.
The Sony Walkman launched a generation of personal cassette players that allowed us to take our own music with us for the first time in a more compact form and better sound quality than a portable record player, and without the soundtrack being selected for us on a transistor radio.
Remote-controlled cars, video cassette recorders (in Betas or VHS) and all manner of gadgets began showing up under our Christmas trees.
Tandy electronics was one of many retailers benefiting from the tech boom. Even animatronics featured in 1987.
By the end of the decade, the CD had revolutionised our musical habits. Easier to store and less likely to scratch, we all thought that CDs were the bee’s knees — at least it was before the digital revolution.
Christmas food became a little more casual in the 1980s, with some families moving away from the Euro-centric Christmas with all the trimmings.
The Australian Women’s Weekly’s Christmas Cooking spread in November 1981, preserved by the National Library of Australia, had two distinct themes — the glazing of meat and the use of apricots.
It featured an a brandied apricot glazed ham, a glazed leg of pork with tinned pineapple and grated ginger, turkey with an apricot and water chestnut stuffing and a Christmas fruit and nut loaf with glace apricots, glace cherries, glace pineapple and glace ginger among its list of traditional puddings, cakes and foodstuffs.
In December 1982, recognising Australia’s climatic challenges, the Weekly presented Christmas Dinner Hot or Cold — “all the favourites — turkey, goose, duck, pork, lamb” in combinations served hot or cold, pre-cooked to make life easier for the home chef.
Again, not a mention of seafood for Christmas. But as the decade rolled on, there was a trend in some families towards a less formal festive feast that better matched our summery Christmas.
Acres of prawns, crayfish and other seafood filled platters, with salads replacing roasted vegetables and pavlovas and trifles replacing warm puddings in an era when we were embracing and celebrating our unique “Australian-ness”.
The great Australian barbecue also took on a more prominent role, at least in part because of the rise of the Weber kettle barbecue as a roaster in the 1980s.
Young Talent Time celebrated its final Christmas in 1988. Watch as the team sings with the National Boys Choir.
WHEN XMAS MEANT CANNED HAM, JELLY PUDDING
One of Melbourne’s greatest Christmas traditions was formalised in 1980.
Although there had been Boxing Day Tests before, they were not held regularly until a formal agreement between the MCC and the Australian Cricket Board in 1980.
Before then, the odd Test was held over the Christmas period but most Melbourne Tests were played over the New Year period, with Sheffield Shield game reserved for Boxing Day.
Another tradition changed at Carols by Candlelight in 1989. It was the last year that Brian Naylor hosted the event.
This was the last time that Channel 9 selected a Melburnian to regularly host this very Melbourne charity event, which raised money for the Royal Victorian Institute of the Blind (now Vision Australia) for services to children who are blind or have low vision.
Ray Martin took the helm from 1990 until 2007, but two Victorians hosted in 1999: Glenn Ridge and Jennifer Keyte.
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