In last week's story, I wrote of what a friend of ours had seen over the 80 years of her life so far. I made the point that a lady of 80 years had been around for a third of our white history.
We had lunch and the afternoon went quickly as we remembered so many things that are here no more.
Last week I wrote mostly about transport changes - it would need the whole newspaper to cover every change that has happened in her lifetime. This week I'll list some of the simpler things, but certainly not all.
For instance she remembers when lamb shanks were used for the dogs and when the butcher would throw them in for free. The same applied to mutton flap, although it was sometimes used to make soup, needing the fat skimmed off but with a rich flavour.
Her family had a kerosene-powered refrigerator and that made a difference between her memories and those of the people who used ice-boxes and Coolgardie safes. She didn't have to eat ice-cream straight away. At our place, Dad would bring a family brick home wrapped in wet newspaper and we'd have to eat it fairly much straight away.
She remembered her mother making cordial using a small bottle of concentrate and, she thought, four cups of sugar. That led to our recalling old brands, some of which were fondly remembered.
We remembered Brockhoff biscuits and remembered particularly the "cream biscuits" with their various fillings. We didn't see much of them. We remembered Arnott's, once a strong Aussie brand.
She remembered Swallow and Ariell, makers of the Marie and Uneeda biscuits. In 1925, the company started producing ice-cream and this part of the company was eventually sold to Peters in 1956.
She remembers the jingle "The flying swallow, your guarantee of quality". She and my wife insisted on singing it, several times.
Sennitt's (remember the Polar Bear?) began in 1904 but the famous Polar Bear was not the trademark until the late 1930s. It lasted until Unilever bought Sennitt's in 1961 and dropped the label in favour of Streets. We both remembered when ice-creams came in three flavours - vanilla (or "plain"), chocolate and strawberry. These were combined in "family bricks" as Neapolitan ice-cream.
She remembered the family bricks, and the dixies (a small cardboard cup of ice-cream), and she remembered that her favourite was the wafer, a rectangle of ice-cream with two wafer biscuits. One had to unwrap the ice-cream and put it between the wafer biscuits.
She remembered the large plastic ice-cream cones on milkbar roofs, but it took a minute or two before we remembered that that was a Peter's Ice-cream sign.
She remembered Protex soap, and then Val came up with Nu-Wash in the container with the metal clip across the top. That container was a long way ahead of its time. That brought back Reckitt's "blue bag", a little cotton bag containing a blue tint which somehow made things whiter. That tint was of aquamarine and starch, and it took away the yellow tint of aging cottons. We all remembered it. That brought back the very big bars of Velvet soap in the laundry.
She remembers Colgate's Mrs Marsh dipping chalk into blue dyed water to show how fluoride was absorbed and she remembers the heated and very public arguments about adding fluoride.
She remembers when cigarettes were advertised as being sophisticated and even healthy. We chatted about this and made a list. No longer with us are Black and White, Ardath, Capstan, Turf, Senior Service, Camel, Craven A, Peter Stuyvesant, Pall Mall, Kool, Alpine and so on. The plain cigarettes were doomed, as Camels and Lucky Strikes, Chesterfield, Rothman's Plain have all vanished. There are probably many others.
She remembered many other things that were not to do with food, or travel. I mentioned in last week's story the conflicts she had seen, but there were other historic moments she will never forget.
She remembered the first man on the moon stepping down from the Apollo 11 lander on July 20, 1969, and she remembered that the country stopped to watch that historic first step.
She remembered the loss of Prime Minister Harold Holt off Cheviot Beach on December 17, 1967, and the many wild rumours that circulated.
She remembered well the turbulent years of the Whitlam government, 1972 to 1975, with all the scandals that involved, but also with a number of large steps forward for this slumbering country. Of course, she also remembers "the dismissal" and the country supporting the dismissal at the general election which followed.
She remembers the April 4, 1968 murder of Martin Luther King and the assassination of US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963.
She remembers the Lindy Chamberlain matter and the cry "a dingo has my baby" that was heard around the world.
Obviously, she remembers well the Vietnam War and a conflicted population, with the moratorium marches and the sometimes - but not all that often - bad treatment of the returning veterans. She remembers the Save our Sons movement.
She remembers the great scandal when Jean Shrimpton attended the 1965 Melbourne Cup wearing a dress that ended above the knee and - shock, horror - no gloves!
The 1960s were a tremendously turbulent decade and her memory is that the 1970s were almost as exciting, but not quite.
There were so many things that came up over that long afternoon that these two stories could have been 20. The list above covers a few of the major events lived through by the last tough and adventurous generation, but there were also countless minor changes.
In her adult life, we switched to decimal currency (February 14, 1966), we changed our national anthem and we saw the strange growth of a republican movement. She remembers many, many referenda, including the May 17, 1967 referendum on recognition of Aboriginal people.
Many of these things were important. But there were many things she remembered that were certainly less important but still memorable. She fondly remembered a childhood in which Queen Elizabeth's coronation and her first visit to Australia were hugely exciting to moat Australians.
She remembers even more trivial things, like the introduction of sliced bread. She remembers radios being an optional extra in motor cars. She remembers those first black-and-white television shows and the excitement of being able to watch the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.
She remembers the introduction of the first computers available to general public and she remembers Beta video cassettes competing VHS. She remembers cameras which used black-and-white roll film.
Obviously, this conversation (and this story) could go on almost forever. It might be an interesting exercise for all of us, including those who've lived for less than her third of our modern history, to sit down with friends and have the same discussion.