Fifty years ago my family proudly owned a basic-specification blue station wagon made in Australia by General Motors Holden. Today the family car is a basic-specification white people carrier made in Japan by Toyota. How has the family car evolved over that time? Our car of the 1960s had bench seats for six adults (in [more...]
Being a conservative young man back in the early sixties, I had avowed that I wouldn’t dance the twist, but then I was on the dance floor when the next number was the twist, and I didn’t want to stop dancing—with “her.” Wikipedia gives a good description of the dance: “The Twist is performed by [more...]
The debates held by the Mosman Debating Society in the first few years of the 1960s were diverse, but as always included international affairs: That darkest Africa should be declared black (defeated) That we approve of Britain’s entry into the Common Market (carried) That Indonesia is justified in her claim to West New Guinea (no [more...]
Australian pop superstar Johnny Farnham rose to fame in 1967-68 with a massively-successful song Sadie, the Cleaning Lady (video). No other song by an Australian artist had done so well on the Australian charts during the 1960s. Although the song is musically unadventurous, it launched Farnham's career. The video is in black and white, because [more...]
Cass Elliot was the heavyweight of the 60s group The Mamas And The Papas in more ways than one. She had a fabulous voice and tremendous stage presence, but was also seriously obese. Cass died on 29 July 1974 at the age of 32 at Flat 12, 9 Curzon Place, Mayfair, London—the same flat where [more...]
Bubblegum music is a kind of pop music manufactured to appeal to young teens and pre-teens. The songs have simple melodies and regular “bopping” beats. The repetitive, easy-to-remember riffs and choruses make the songs easy to learn and easy to sing. The lyrics are straightforward, even stupidly simplistic, though sometimes with a double entendre thrown [more...]
Heavy metal music is a kind of hard rock music. It’s characterised by more than just its musical attributes, but music is the obvious place to begin… Most of all, heavy metal is loud. If it were played quietly as elevator music, it would be light metal music. It’s not the peak volume that counts, [more...]
Dunlop Volley tennis shoes were a big hit in the 1960s, but tennis players nowadays wear more specialised footwear. The Volley is way out of fashion and hard to find anywhere else in the world. So why do people in Australia keep buying them, with over 20 million pairs sold according to Dunlop? And who [more...]
Polaroid cameras produce self-developing photos, so that you can see the photo within a minute or so. The technology was developed by Edwin Land in the 1940s. The cameras and film were sold by his Polaroid Corporation, and later by others. The earliest of these cameras, the Polaroid Land Camera, used rolls of film and [more...]
Today’s movie cinema format comprises a large chunk of previews and advertisements, followed by the main feature. But it wasn’t always like that. In the past there were three common formats: “shorts plus main feature”, “double feature” and “continuous screening”. “Continuous screening” was used for “blockbusters” where the cinema was expecting to operate near full [more...]
Radio Caroline began regular broadcasts during Easter 1964. The playlist was youth-oriented popular music, and served an audience which was not provided for by the government-controlled licensed stations. Because Radio Caroline operated from a ship in international waters off the United Kingdom, it did not require a licence. At their peak, Radio Caroline and the [more...]
When NBC started airing Star Trek in 1966 few could have imagined the cultural icon it would become. Here’s what happened to the leading characters of the show after it ended: William Shatner (James T. Kirk) was relatively absent from acting for years after the end of Star Trek, possibly because he had been typecast [more...]
The traditional Australian milk bar enjoyed its heyday during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, when the influx of migrants from Italy and Greece brought new life to the old Welsh tradition of the Milk Bar. There are still a few around, though they’ve become rather thin on the ground now that Australians have access to [more...]
My Favorite Martian was a sitcom that ran from 1963 to 1966. Tim O’Hara, newspaper reporter, rescued a martian from his crashed spaceship and pretended to the world that it was his “Uncle Martin”. This led to many awkward situations, which formed the backbone of the show’s episodes. Tim O’Hara was played by Bill Bixby. [more...]
I was a schoolboy in the 1960s, and the most common playground games were chasings (“tag”), football and branding. Branding was played with a tennis ball. At first, one person is “in” and needs to throw the ball to hit another player hard enough to leave a red mark (the “branding”). Each player who is [more...]