In 1923, when Annie Sharman conceived the idea of a little recipe book to raise funds for her school community, she had no idea that it would still be in print 90 years later and sell more than half a million copies, not just in South Australia but all around the world. Handed down from […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Back in 1979, Brian Doddridge was just 14 years old and thought that pigs might fly. Well, at least his pig. Brian had entered the Channel 10 annual Adelaide Birdman Rally and, with the help of some friends and family, had created what he planned to be a giant pig that would fly. The rally […]
Following my column in the Advertiser ‘Boomer’ magazine recently on Rowley Park Speedway, Advertiser photographer Barry O’Brien wrote in to the paper with his own memories of “those adrenalin-pumping nights at the dirt track”. Barry started photographing Rowley Park, also known as “the pughole”, for the newspaper in 1958 and attended the track on regular […]
Is the first job you ever had still in existence today? Telegram boys, lift operators, milkmen, comptometrists, typists, tea ladies, linotype operators, petrol pump attendants, tram conductors, manual switchboard operators and the lavatory man have all disappeared as jobs since the 50s. I started my first job at 15 working for the PMG delivering telegrams […]
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 […]
