An important tradition of growing up in Adelaide from the 50s was the Saturday afternoon pictures at the local picture theatre, town hall or flea pit. There were always two full length pictures, an episode of the serial, a cartoon and a Pete Smith Special to watch while eating your Jaffas, Fantales or a Dandy […]
Today, let’s take a sweet trip down memory lane to when Jaffas were made by a company called ‘Sweetacres’ and came in a box, Hoadleys made something called a Polly Waffle and a box of MacRobertson ‘Old Gold’ had soft and hard centres. It’s amazing to think that such a simple thing as the packaging […]
Is it just my imagination or did fish and chips taste better when they were wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper? I’m not exactly sure when it happened, probably sometime back in the 70s, but the ‘fish and chippery ‘ dispensed with the age old tradition of the newspaper wrapping and went with the cleaner look of […]
“How do you do, ladies and gentlemen, and boys and girls. I am Julius Sumner Miller, and physics is my business”. Remember the TV show “Why Is It So?” which was broadcast from 1963 to about the mid 80’s? It became an instant hit known for its “cool experiments, interesting science, and the professor’s fantastic […]
Whenever the discussion turns to beautiful old buildings that have been lost to our city over the years, the first one that comes to my mind is the South Australian Hotel which stood proudly on North Terrace for almost 100 years. The ‘South’ opened in 1879 and represented the finer things in life. In 1964 […]
When fences were lower, fruit and veg was currency and kids just roamed free How different to today was your neighbourhood and the neighbours as you were growing up? I was a child in the 50s and neighbourhoods were mainly made up of working class families. Some fathers worked in offices or ran a small […]
“I used to love going here as a kid, so sad my daughter will never know how good it WAS!!!” The ‘Adventure Park Playground” at Monash brings back a lot of happy memories for many Adelaide and country families. It was started in the late 60’s by engineer, Grant Telfer and was developed over a […]
Vinyl records, radiograms, transistors and cassette recorders … what fun we had before computers! Vinyl record sales in Australia have increased by almost 100 per cent this year. It seems a younger generation has rediscovered the world of “fantastic black plastic” in the digital age. I asked one of my (much) younger colleagues why he […]
Do you recall the huge two-storey indoor amusement park that occupied the top levels of the REMM Myer Centre in Rundle Mall? Dazzleland was a theme park, developed as part of the original centre itself, built between 1988 and 1991 at a cost of $1 billion. It was sold some years later for just $140 […]
I must confess to some fascination about Adelaide’s ‘other car’ the Lightburn Zeta. As a city we have a proud reputation in automotive production with Holden and Chrysler cars but back in the 60s, there was also a third car, Australia’s ‘micro car’, manufactured by Lightburn industries which had, until 1963, manufactured tools, cement mixers, […]
