The Milk Carton Regatta was Adelaide’s answer to Darwin’s Beer Can Regatta and was first staged at the Patawalonga in 1980. Along with the Birdman Rally it was staged, sponsored and broadcast live by Channel 10. Thousands of people would turn up each year at the Pat for a fun day out and watch in […]
Archive | September, 2014
Don Dunstan; our most colourful polly!
South Australia’s most colorful pollie ever has to be Don Dunstan. Colorful, yes, (in more ways than one), controversial, clever, and even entertaining, he was twice Premier of South Australia between June 1967 and April 1968, and again between June 1970 and February 1979. Whether it was turning up in Parliament in pink shorts, sacking police commissioners, […]
Tom the Cheap
Remember ‘Tom the Cheap’, a supermarket chain that first appeared in Adelaide about the 60s & 70s. According to Wikipedia it was started by Tom Wardle from WA and was probably the introduction of aisle type shopping in Australia. Previous to that groceries were served from behind a counter. Tom’s offered a no-frills service with just […]
Samorn, The Elephant in our Zoo
Remember when a day out at the Adelaide Zoo included a ride in the Elephant cart pulled by Samorn the elephant? Earlier this year there were a number of very strongly worded letters to the Advertiser from people outraged by the suggestion that we needed another elephant at the zoo, so our kids and grandkids […]
What Did You Order for School Lunch?
Remember the brown paper bags for school lunch orders? You might have even been a lunch monitor. When I was at school we never had anything as fancy as the printed paper bags, back in the 50s and 60s if we ordered from the school canteen, we wrote on the plain paper bag. When my […]