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Archive | 2014

Downtown, taken from the TV commercial.  everyone “Great skating, great music, good food and fun….It’s the greatest skate in town”.

Downtown, the Greatest Skate in Town

  “I remember my parents taking me to Downtown at night for the first time, and walking down Hindley Street and seeing all the neon lights was amazing. Roller skating was great there. We had stuff to do, what do our kids have like this”? Most people seem to remember Downtown for the roller skating […]

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Photo from Wikipedia. Number 96 was a last ditch effort to save the Channel 10 network from bankruptcy.

Remember When No. 96 was on TV?

Remember when Number 96 was the biggest show on Australian television and every night we would tune in to Channel 10 for the adventures of Abigail, Dorrie Evans and Herb, Arnold Feather and Flo? It was a great time for Australian television, although legend has it that the show was not so much born out […]

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Photo from Wikipedia Commons. Double Decker Trolley Bus 1940s showing the front and rear entrances. Love the old advertising for Alaska Ice Cream, The Perfect Food!

Adelaide’s Last Double Decker Buses

With the arrival in Adelaide last month of the new double decker bus, I thought it timely to remember our first lot of double deckers and share some memories of the days when the old double decker trolley buses and diesels serviced various parts of the city. Double deckers first made an appearance on our […]

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TV test patterns came on at night after the last show had finished and again in the morning before transmission started

Remember Some of These!

Posted from the internet. I am not sure who the author is but this was sent to me a few days ago; Someone asked me the other day “What was your favourite ‘fast food’ when you were growing up”? “We didn’t have fast food when I was growing up”, I informed him, “all the food […]

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John Martins Anthony Harrison

Christmas Shopping in the 50 and 60s

Remember when shops opened their doors for trading at 9am each day, Monday to Friday and closed at 5.30pm in the afternoon? Weekend trading was strictly limited from 9am to 11.30am, there was no trading on the Sabbath or on public holidays and there was no late night trading at all. All the big department […]

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Bev Harrell publicity photograph 1968. Source: Milesago: Australasian Music & Popular Culture 1964-1975.

Some Local Music and Local Venues

Remember Bev Harrell, The Twillights, Masters Apprentices, and Jimmy Barnes with Cold Chisel? Do you recall the Hi Fi Club, Princeton Club, The Palais on North Terrace, or the Octagon at Elizabeth? Remember Big Bob Francis in his gold suit or Ron Tremaine’s pop music magazine about the local pop music scene, Young Modern? Here […]

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the "Channel 10 Christmas Appeal". Stars from around the network would fly into Adelaide for the weekend live broadcast from SAS10 studios in Gilberton.

The TV Telethons. Donations and Fun.

Cast your memory back to a time when we had local television that cared about the community and every year would hold a charity fund raiser which included local TV and radio personalities, musicians, singers, performers and members of the public. There was the Channel 10 Christmas Appeal, Channel 7 Good Friday Appeal and Channel […]

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Photo from Glen H  Flickr Photostream. Marion Shopping Centre in 1974 with the escalators to the Quaterdeck and John Martin's Department Store

Marion Shopping Centre. The Early Years.

Westfield Marion was one of Adelaide’s first suburban shopping centres, built in 1968 on a large expanse of land bordered by Sturt, Diagonal and Morphett Roads, Marion was not the huge, very modern, state-of-the-art shopping centre that we know today. In fact back in the early years it was a relatively small complex that I […]

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The Granite Island Chairlift, installed in 1964 and removed in 1996. Photo courtesy of Alex Prichard on Flickr

Adelaide Now’s Book Review

Adelaide Now publishes more photos and memories from “Adelaide Remember When”, the book Adelaide Now, the online edition of the Advertiser has shown some more of the photos and stories from my newly published book Adelaide Remember When. The book contains more than 300 photos of Adelaide, some never before published, from the 1950s to […]

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