ADELAIDE REMEMBER WHEN….The Book
“Memories are better than diamonds and nobody can steal them from you”. So wrote Rodman Philbrick in “The Last Book in the Universe”.
This is a book full of diamonds, a collection of the most popular memoirs and photographs from the nostalgia lovers of the ‘Adelaide Remember When’ Facebook website, ranging from the 1950s to the 1980s, the era of the Baby Boomers.
Photo from The Tram Museum Adelaide. A tram coming through the underpass on Goodwood Road at Millswood in 1956. Trams were Adelaide’s main form of public transport for some 30 years from 1925 until 1958 when on the 22nd of November that year the last tram left Victoria Square bound for Cheltenham.
It’s a fascinating glimpse of our city in a more innocent era, when life was simple and we seemed to have much more time. We were perhaps the last generation who could walk or ride our bikes to school. We climbed trees, skinned our knees and elbows and played in the street with all the other neighbourhood kids until the street lights went on.
Photo from Newspix. When the milky used to deliver the milk every morning. As a kid, it would be the first thing you would hear every day, the clink of the glass milk bottles as the milky took the empty bottles from the day before, which were washed and waiting him, and replaced them with full bottles.
On a hot Adelaide summer night, long before air conditioners arrived, we slept outside on the lawn or at the beach, hoping to catch a cool breeze. We never lost the car keys because they were always left in the ignition. We could walk out the front door and leave it unlocked and we never bothered about padlocking the bike.
Everybody’s mum was home after school and we got a clip around the ear if we’d been naughty.
We were the generation that gave the world rock’n’roll music, the Beatles, the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the social revolution of the 1970s.
Photo by Frank Hall, Courtesy of Elaine Hall. Many of the photos in this book are from private photo collections. This is Victoria Square and Grote Street corner where the Hilton International
Hotel now stands, with Hi-Fi Fashions on the corner and with Moores Department store in the background
Many of the photos in this book have been sent to me from private albums and never published before. I also dug into the archives at the Advertiser and into the massive collections held by the State Library of South Australia.
Adelaide Remember When is now available at all good bookshops around Adelaide, online from our shop on this website and also from the Advertiser Book Shop at 31 Waymouth Street. RRP $39.99
I’m looking at the photo of the tram under the railway bridge on Goodwood Road, and I recall a story an elderly couple told me that had to do with that underpass.
Late one night about twenty odd years ago, when I was working for The Advertiser, I missed my usual bus home to Melrose Park and waited for another just south of the Adelaide Town Hall. An elderly couple had just come out of the hall where they had listened to a performance of sorts, and we got talking.
As you probably have gathered already, this was in the era just before most people got fascinated with hand-held electronic gadgets as a preferential means of communicating, rather talking directly with one another ! An elegantly dressed Mr and Mrs Gibson enlightened me with their memories of a long bygone era.
He had been a pharmacist with a store on the corner of King William Street and Hindley Street during the Great Depression. He recollected that once a week or so, he would load up his vehicle and go down to Port Adelaide to gather prescriptions and dispensed those filled form the previous visit. Apparently Port Adelaide was lacking a local chemist back then.
Mrs Gibson mentioned that when she was a young girl the horse-drawn tram crossed the railway line at a level crossing where the underpass now stands on Goodwood Road. She also remembers the underpass being excavated, largely by hand.
When I told them I lived in Melrose Park, she recalled there had been army training camp set up in that area during the First World War, extending from Cross Road nearly to Daws Road.
This couple insisted that I get off the bus with them, instead of walking the distance from their Goodwood Road stop to the one I usually went to on Churchill Road.They lived just behind Bowling Centre on Cross Road, in a smartly presented 1920s house that they built, and they offered to drive me home.
His car was an immaculately kept 1960s Valiant. It was a delightful end to a wonderful night.
Unfortunately I never met them again, but have had the great pleasure on many occasions of listening to other people’s recollections and fascinating life stories.
My advice to my own kids is to be sure take time out occasionally from endlessly thumbing away with with those electronic gadgets, and to talk to people older than themselves. It’ll make them realise just how much the world has changed in such a relatively short space of time!
I lived in that street. Elmo Avenue, Westbourne Park.. I reckon the man was Cyril Gibson, and from the 1950s and into the 70s he had a Chemist shop near the Hawthorn railway crossing.
Yes, my mom (born 1912) who grew up in a 1922 Col. Light Gardens bungalow west of Goodwood Road, also told me that the Goodwood subway was excavated by men and horses. It opened in 1915 so she must have heard this from her parents.
In refernce to the mention of an army training camp, here is an hilarious newspaper account of an incident that happened involving an American plane dropping things in the area mentioned.
http://www.clghs.org.au/images/bombing%20of%20CLG%201944.pdf
I lived in that street. Elmo Avenue, Westbourne Park.. I reckon the man was Cyril Gibson, and from the 1950s and into the 70s he had a Chemist shop near the Hawthorn railway crossing. They had a Tudor style home.