by John Wells
Val and I have a very dear friend who has just celebrated her 80th birthday. I can't tell you her name, because 'celebrated' is not really the right word. "Reluctantly accepted" might be a better way to put it.
When she was growing up car-jacking usually meant you were changing a wheel. A home invasion was by bees, or moths, or mice.
We talked about the changes she had seen in those years.
If you take the time from 1788 to now, that is 236 years, bar a few months, so with 80 years up she has lived just over a third of our white history.
We talked for several hours and the changes she had seen seemed almost infinite.
She saw electricity spread through the state in the early 1950s. She saw all sorts of new appliances change the work of the housewife with electric refrigerators and washing machines, dishwashers and stoves, fans and steam irons and light bulbs. The list goes on. Those are all things we take for granted,
All of you who are my age or thereabouts will remember most of these things but younger folk might well simply accept them unquestioningly. We older folk still remember when we didn't have them.
As a child she flew to Melbourne from Hobart in a DC3 aircraft which had to detour well east to avoid a storm, and the flight took five hours. She flew in a Short flying boat from Sydney's Rose Bay to Norfolk Island. In 1964 the arrival of two Boeing 727-100 jet aircraft one for Trans Australia Airlines (TAA) and one for Ansett-ANA, brought domestic air travel into a newer, faster world. By the by she has seen airlines and aircraft come and go.
That old DC3 has probably been scrapped by now, or placed in an aircraft museum.
The other planes we knew well post-war included the Viscount, the DC6B and the Electra. These were good workhorse aircraft but the arrival of commercial jets relegated them to the past almost immediately.
Her father bought a Volkswagen – the original 'Beetle' and took his family on a road trip from Highett to Sydney. She doesn't remember it being particularly crowded but she remembers that the only way to get any cooling was to open the window.
She has seen all the changes to motor cars since then, including quarter-light windows to catch the breeze, and dashboard vents with fan assistance, right up to air-conditioning. It would take forever to list the changes to family vehicles since that Sydney trip. Just stop and think about that for a minute, or two or three minutes.
Just get a list of the extras on your car, and cross them all off. What you'll have left is the accessories list for most of the cars running during her childhood, the Humbers and the Austins, the Hillmans and the Singers, the Wolselys and the Morrises. What about the Ford stable of the Customline, the Prefect and the Pilot? All were gone before she was even an adult.
The Wolsely lasted until 1975. The Rootes Group (Hillman, Humber, Commer, etc) was partly bought by the Chrysler Group in 1964 and the remining shares were bought by Chrysler in 1967.
I always wanted to own a Humber Super Snipe when I grew up. That never happened. I started with an Austin A40.
Most people on farms in the early 1950s had cars but there were still people who used jinkers, carts and 'floats up into the mid-50s.
When the family went up to town they often used the 'red rattler' suburban passenger trains. These trains had carriages with no corridor but with swinging doors opening out from each side of the compartments. She has lived through many upgrades of suburban services and the closure of many country passenger services.
She was aware of the duplication of most of the Gippsland railway, and its electrification in the 1950s. She saw the steam locomotives withdrawn and, in most cases, scrapped. The ones that survived and were collected at Williamstown are still out in the weather and looking for a roof, I believe.
She remembers the sound of the milkman's horse and cart, and the jingle of empty milk bottles and she remembers her mother leaving the milk money on the verandah with the empty bottles. She remembers "Sam, Sam, the Dunny man", but was too much of a lady to have ever used that rhyme, or so she said.
She remembers soft-drink brands like Marchants, Tarax and Boon Spa (she was not close enough to Warragul to remember the Palex and Extra brands).
There were three of us talking and over an hour or so we went through, among other things, all the food brands and styles, though it is unlikely that we remembered all of the names we once knew. I'll come back to that next week.
She remembers the Argus, a daily newspaper, from 1946 to 1957, which started as a conservative newspaper but moved to the left in 1949 or so when it was bought out by an English company with a pro-Labor mindset and it gradually faded away until it died in 1957.
That left her with The Sun, The Herald, The Age, the Sporting Globe and The Truth, which her father would not have in the house. She well remembered the pink paper of the Sporting Globe and its all-year-long support for the Royal Children's Hospital.
She remembers when nearly all the houses were on blocks large enough to allow for a large tree or two, and when almost every backyard had a vegetable patch. Those houses had three bedrooms, the largest one being twelve feet square, a kitchen and a 'dining' room, and a bathroom. The laundry, often called a wash-house, was either attached to the back of the house or even, sometimes, free-standing, with its troughs and wringer and, even in suburbia, a copper, though the copper was often replaced with a chip heater.
She had never lived in a house that drew water from a tank or a well so she has missed that legendary process of pumping and carrying water.
More importantly, perhaps, she lived through the Korean War 1950-1953, the Malayan Emergency 1948-1960, the Indonesian Konfrontasi 1963-1966, Timor Leste 1999-2002, Rwandan genocide 1994, the first and second Gulf Wars and, of course, Afghanistan. She could not really remember much about the first two, but she feels a little more peace in the world would be a good idea.
I'll second that.
