What ‘Christmas with all the trimmings’ meant in 1970s Melbourne
“Christmas with All the Trimmings” meant something very different in the Melbourne of the 1970s. It was an era of glazed canned ham, apricot duck and jellied pudding, giving new meaning to the moniker “The Decade Taste Forgot”.
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It has often been declared “The Decade that Taste Forgot”, but that wasn’t the case with Christmas dinners in Melbourne in the 1970s — even if the brown corduroys and Miller shirts look the worse for wear when you look back at your old Polaroids.
The Australian Women’s Weekly still had no time for a summery seafood banquet for Christmas dinner, nor was there a barbecue to be seen, but the traditional Christmas feast took on a certain continental chic in the 1970s.
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Its “Your Carefree Guide to A Perfect Christmas Dinner” from December 1971 promised a stress-free feast for housewives to prepare, but it all seems rather complicated.
It recommended asparagus soup, old-style seafood cocktails, gazpacho, brandied pate and iced cucumber soup as entrée options, and roast turkey with a choice of herb, forcemeat or chestnut stuffing for the main course.
Choices for dessert included a jellied Christmas pudding with brandied custard or hard sauce (a concoction of butter, icing sugar and brandy or rum); a Christmas trifle and strawberry gelato.
Unlike the Christmas recipes of previous decades, the turkey was the star of the show. The feature is preserved by the National Library of Australia’s Trove collection here:
‘Christmas with All the Trimmings’, the Weekly’s Christmas 1972 cooking feature, included cold duck in aspic, roast turkey and a rich coffee liqueur mousse but, strangely, a recipe for a glazed canned ham.
Turkey and apricot duck were the two main course stars of the Weekly’s “Festive Foods of Christmas” guide in 1976, along with fruity white wine and white run punches and a selection of summer salads.
How about a glazed ham, studded with cloves and glace cherries, roast duck with cherries and a handmade ice-cream cake with not a millilitre of Streets Blue Ribbon to be had from the 1977 Step-By-Step to “Great Christmas Food”?
The retail revolution that began with the construction of the Chadstone shopping centre in 1960 meant more changes to the way we shopped for Christmas in the ‘70s.
Friday night trading, abandoned in Victoria in 1946, was reinstated on Friday, November 26, 1971 — in time for a Christmas shopping frenzy.
Shops all over Victoria could open until 9pm on Fridays and, later, Thursdays too.
The front page of the Sun News-Pictorial the next day told the story. Headed “Bourke St., 8:20 … a happening!”, it showed big crowds and lines of traffic on Bourke Street under the iconic Myer clock in the late evening.
Seven years later, the stretch of Bourke Street between Swanston and Elizabeth streets was closed to traffic and the creation of the Bourke Street Mall began.
Of course, any shopping centre or main street in Victoria remained deserted after 1pm on a Saturday until 9am on Monday.
The unassailable march of major regional shopping centres across the suburbs continued unabated.
Fountain Gate opened in November 1970 but was greatly expanded a decade later.
The doors to the Broadmeadows Shopping Centre opened in 1974. Westfield Airport West opened in 1976, with new shopping centres in Knox and Greensborough opening for business in 1977 and 1978 respectively, while the transformation of the Jam Factory in Prahran into a retailing icon began in 1979.
The car was king, and these centres further eroded the once powerful grip of city centre department stores.
With Foy’s already gone, others such as Buckley and Nunn were on the slide by the end of the ‘70s.
Even regional cities got in on the act. Marong Village opened in Kangaroo Flat, in Bendigo’s south side, in 1979 with a Kmart, a Coles New World and a cluster of speciality shops.
Carols by Candlelight, first televised by Melbourne’s Channel 0 in 1969 and hosted by Philip Gibb, grew to become a Christmas Eve family favourite — a tradition that continues today.
In 1979, the event switched to Nine and went national with newsreader Brian Naylor as host.
It wasn’t the only popular Christmas singing of the day, though.
Young Talent Time made a big splash around Australia when it debuted in 1971.
The team behind YTT made a short film, Caravan Holiday, in which cast members Debbie Byrne, Jane Scali, Vicki Broughton, Philip Gould, Rod Kirkham, Greg Miles and Jamie Redfern … well … took a caravan holiday for the summer. Johnny Young bobbed up in multiple roles including as a caravan park manager.
This little slice of summer fun was televised on Christmas Eve, 1972, and was a short supporting the Ryan O’Neal and Barbra Streisand hit What’s Up Doc? at the pictures.
This clip features Redfern chatting to noted caravanner Johnny Farnham, at the time both were kings of pop. Just wait for Johnny’s shower scene right at the end.
Comedy gold.
Just for fun, here’s Johnny Young, Tiny Tina and the YTT cast from later in the ‘70s hamming it up for a snowy Christmas medley on Young Talent Time.
Myer celebrated the 20th anniversary of its Christmas windows in 1976 with “Peg Maltby’s Fairy Tales”, honouring Dandenongs artist Peg Maltby.
Nick Castles shared on YouTube this wonderful home movie of Myer’s rooftop Christmas carnival from the mid-70s.
Christmas gifts were changing in the 1970s.
Dragster bicycles for boys and shiny bikes with baskets and handlebar ribbons for girls, skateboards were all the rage in the 1970s, but this was an era when mass production and cross-promotion began to come to the fore.
Toys and action figures associated with Star Wars were a part of this new and highly commercialised gift-giving, along with World Series Cricket and VFL memorabilia, and branded items celebrating stuntman Evel Knievel and glam rockers KISS, among many.
The era of home computer gaming dawned in 1979 with the arrival of the faux timber finish of the Atari 2600 games console.
Suddenly, Test Match, Monopoly, Kerplunk and Mouse Trap seemed daggy compared with Space Invaders.
By the mid-‘70s, many families found a colour TV under their trees as we hastily dumped our black-and-white sets in an era of Technicolour fashions. Colour tellies were pricey, but consumers adopted them faster than most of the rest of the world.
Thanks to the arrival of Bankcard, Australia’s first and only credit card system, in 1974, that big purchase became a little easier to reach — although much costlier in the long run.
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