The way we were: readers respond in droves

A few weeks back I shared an inventory of things, from Brylcreem to hula hoops and ministerial responsibility, that seem to have achieved past tense. Readers have responded to my list with thousands more examples – and quite a few protests. My assertion that LPs have vanished was refuted with the news that business is booming. I’ve also learnt that there’s a shop in Melbourne that stocks only one product: hula hoops. Some old-style barbers live on, as do a few classic fish ’n’ chip shops. And there’s a DVD rental shop in Albany, WA. Rule-proving exceptions of course, but poignant.

In six decades as a columnist I’ve rarely seen such a response. Three weeks after publication, hundreds of funny, bittersweet and evocative emails continue to arrive, full of suggestions and photos. Here are just a few…

Salvos on the street corner. String bags for shopping. Free-range dogs. Glass milk bottles at the door and in the school yard, magpies pecking at their caps. Treadle sewing machines. Oslo lunches.

Radiograms. Box Brownies. Slide nights. Community singing in town halls. Railway refreshment rooms. DDT flyspray. Kero heaters, kero lanterns, kero fridges. Sunday School picnics. Home visits by the local doctor.

SP bookies and their “cockatoos”. Hopscotch. Treating bee-stings with Reckitt’s Blue. Being woken at dawn by the neighbour’s rooster. Playing Cowboys and Indians. Yonnie fights and quince fights. Pushing hand-mowers up and down the lawn. Taking newspapers to the butchers to wrap your meat order. Or selling them to the fish ’n’ chip shop.

Two mail deliveries per day, with the postie blowing his whistle. X-ray machines

to irradiate children’s feet in shoe shops; whooshing vacuum tubes for orders in big retail stores; bootmakers who would “half sole and heel” your shoes. “Coffee” made from chicory essence. “A Bex, a cup of tea and a good lie down”, F-O-R-D Pills, Ardath, Craven A and Turf cigarettes. Porphyry Pearl. Corsets, debutante balls, canasta, fondue dinners with copper fondue pots.

Booking interstate or international phone calls; telephone “party lines” in the country. Catching tadpoles and waiting for their legs to grow; cruelly pouring water down cicada holes to force them to the surface. Getting “six of the best”. Chanting “go back to your own country!” to bewildered “reffo” kids in the playground. Or “Catholic dogs stink like frogs!” to the kids across the street – whose response, quite fairly, was “State, State full of hate”. Ah, the good old days.

It’s an iron-off! Picture: supplied by Mike Bartlett

The six o’clock swill, the Rechabites Society, pub-free suburbs. Gideon bibles, typewriter ribbons, carbon paper, briquettes. Lisle stockings, bed jackets, bloomers, Blue Hills. The Southern Aurora, red rattlers, tram conductors, fuse wire and fuse boxes. Milkshakes in metal containers, steel beer cans without ring pulls that you opened with a pointed tool. When a Girl Marries, Amateur Hour, ABC announcers reading the news with BBC accents, commercial radio announcers mimicking Americans. Making “gings” from forks of trees, keeping silkworms. Crystal sets, mantle radios, threepences in the Christmas pud.

School Army Cadets, Latin classes, Empire Day. Penny bungers, Dinky toys, Meccano sets, snakes and ladders, cars without seat belts, hand signals, train guards blowing whistles, smoke and soot in the eyes from steam engines.

Column shift. Picture: supplied by Mike Bartlett

Rolling Jaffas down the aisle at the flicks, belly-whack dives at the local pool, Chinese burns in the playground, cubby houses, playing “statues”, playing “jacks”, playing doctors and nurses, genuine agate marbles (as opposed to tawdry “glassies”). Coming-ready-or-not. School cases, kit bags, putting pennies on the tram tracks, old toasters that opened like books, Hopalong Cassidy, school bottle drives, Singers of Renown, school desks with inkwells, slates and slate pencils, fountain pens, blotting paper, cursive writing, pencils with rubber erasers on one end. Rotary Gestetner machines, and secretaries taking shorthand.

Chain-pull toilet cistern. Picture: Old Soul

The dunny man or night man [this hero starred in many of your lists], the Rawleigh’s Man, the headlight dipper-switch on the floor of the Holden, the column change, bench seats, water-operated spin-dryers, backyard incinerators, horse-and-cart rubbish collection. Avon calling. The 20-pound note, aka “the Brick”, about a week’s pay for a tradie. The Basic Wage,

the guinea (one pound and one shilling), raising your hat to a woman, giving up your tram or train seat to the elderly, good manners in general. “Esq.” after a name

on an envelope.

Milko. Picture: supplied by Mike Bartlett

Coolgardie safes, ice-chests, your grocer weighing groceries before putting them in brown-paper bags, sawdust on the butcher’s floor. “Spending a penny” or “going to see a man about a horse”, literally “pulling the chain”. The chamber pot. Innumerable Australian colloquialisms, rhyming slang, eiderdowns, lunatic asylums, skipping ropes, ice-cream “spiders”, Tarax lemonade, milk junket. The use of Mr and Mrs, the term “tomboy”, names like Henry and Edna.

Wringer washer. Picture: supplied by Mike Bartlett

Wind-up cars, slot cars, pick-up sticks, tiddlywinks, kaleidoscopes, bicycle clips, whoopee cushions, practical joke shops, sherbet suckers, Vacola bottling outfits, musical chairs, pass-the-parcel, lolly fags. “Rainbow balls” that changed colour when sucked (you had to keep taking them out to look). All-day suckers and sundry gobstoppers. Choo-Choo bars.

Lava lamps. Covering schoolbooks in brown paper. Leaving the plastic cover on the new lounge suite. Ceramic hot water bottles. Swan Vestas matches you struck on the sole of your shoe. Redheads in boxes made of plywood. Bonfires, with spuds cooked in the ashes. Carbide lamps. Primus stoves. Chip heaters. Hand-pump bowsers, driveway service (wash your windscreen, check your tyres). MPH. Farm windmills. Carrier pigeons. Glass scrubbing boards. Wooden pegs. Clothes props. Safari suits, brothel creepers, blue-suede shoes.

Poor people’s food. My grandmother’s specialties included fried bread and dripping on toast – and her pièce de résistance for dessert? Boiling water poured on sugar-sprinkled Milk Arrowroot biscuits.

Kids in the back. Picture: supplied by Mike Bartlett

Billy tea. Zippos. Basin haircuts. Walking to school in all weather. Learning your times tables, the smell of phenyl, the taste of castor oil, spinning tops, aerograms, cheque books, protractors, Post, Pix and People magazines, Sunbathers nudist mag with airbrushed blurs of the naughty bits. White gloves, Westerns, duffel coats, army disposal shops. Cole’s Funny Picture Book. John Martins in Adelaide. Glomesh handbags. Blue rinses. Feather beds. The Three Stooges. Elocution lessons. Police whistles. Peashooters. The whistling kettle.

We were deeply touched by a letter from Michelle: “I live in a Retirement Village with (much) older people. We have a regular cuppa-n-chat. It’s a challenge with deafness, Asperger’s, women who have lived a life suppressed. But with your article we had a terrific walk down memory lane and I was able to get each and every one involved.”

Hope you’ve found it therapeutic, too. Thanks for your help.