Remember the first fridge your family ever bought? Prior to refrigerators we had ice chests. The ice man would come every second day and deliver a big block of ice which he would carry with ice tongs (were they called pliers?) and deliver it into the top of the chest. Fridges arrived in the 50s […]
Can you recall the trolley buses around the city streets? Particularly in Rundle and Hindley Streets, which were always so busy but so narrow, and continuously packed with people, bikes, cars and trolley buses. Our trolleybus system was part of public transport around Adelaide for roughly 30 years from the 1930s to the late 1950s. During the Great Depression, […]
Remember going to your very first John Martin’s Christmas Pageant? The much loved event is now sponsored by the South Australian Credit Unions but the original ‘Johnnies’ pageant had it’s beginnings in 1931 when Sir Edward Hayward visited the United States and Canada and came up with the idea of a Christmas parade through the […]
Many baby boomers reached their teenage years from the mid-60s to the early ’70s, and what a glorious time it was to be a teenager! In 1964, Adelaide really came of age when over 300,000 people turned out to welcome The Beatles, and the local music scene was bubbling with enthusiasm and talent. Every weekend […]
Remember Kingswood Country, the Australian sitcom that screened from 1980 to 1984 on Channel 7? The show featured real Aussie humour and although it was seen by many as racist and sexist, it was in fact meant to mock those attitudes held by many Australians at the time. “Ted” Bullpitt was played by Ross Higgins, […]
Most baby boomers will definitely remember the 5th of November as Guy Fawkes or cracker night. More recently in Australia Halloween has become the popular celebration at around this time of year, but in the 50s, 60s and into the 70s it was Guy Fawkes Night that was observed. The story of Guy Fawkes is […]
Whatever happened to the personal customer service that was provided by the local shops and businesses in the 1950s and the 1960s? Most of it came to an end, of course, with the spread of the big supermarkets and shopping centres around Australia from the mid-1960s. Self-service with products stacked on shelves, shopping trolleys and […]
What were some of the games we used to play, growing up as a kid in the 50s, 60s, and 70s? Long before the ‘age of entitlement’, children had far less toys to play with, so we made do with what we had. Today it seems almost every kid is given more toys at Christmas […]
The telephone has come a very long way, just in our lifetime! In the 50s and 60s when very few residences had the phone connected, any necessary calls were made from a red public phone box, found dotted around the suburbs of Adelaide. Most had the phone book missing, had that faint smell of urine […]
