Years Ago

[tommy.irene]

.My mum used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread butter on bread on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.
Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e. Coli Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake or at the beach instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.
We all took PE ..... And risked permanent injury with a pair of Dunlop sandshoes instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors that cost as much as a small car. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.
We got the cane for doing something wrong at school, they used to call it discipline yet we all grew up to accept the rules and to honour & respect those older than us. We had 50 kids in our class and we all learned to read and write, do maths and spell almost all the words needed to write a grammatically correct letter......., 
FUNNY THAT!!
We all said prayers in school irrespective of our religion, sang the national anthem and no one got upset.
Staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention we wish we hadn’t got.
I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself. I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations. We weren't!!
Oh yeah ... And where was the antibiotics and sterilisation kit when I got that bee sting? Could I have been killed!
We played “King of the Hill” on piles of gravel left on vacant building sites and when we got hurt, mum pulled out the 2/6p bottle of iodine and then we got our backside spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10 day dose of antibiotics and then mum calls the lawyer to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that?
We never needed to get into group therapy and/or anger management classes. We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac!
How did we ever survive?

[chameleon54]

We lived in the country in the 1960,s

We would ride our pushbikes for miles towing a cart with pram wheels to go rabbit trapping and sell pairs of rabbits to the rabbit freezer in town. The skins where stretched on bent fencing wire, dried and salted to be sold to the local wool and skin buyer. Too bad if you caught a brown snake or fox in the trap. Time to ride back home and get dad. The brown snakes where a problem as they would often drag the trap into the hole and the only clue was the marks they left in the sand. Kids beware !!!

Another favorite pass time was bird nesting. Climbing trees to ridiculous / dangerous heights to steal an egg. We would pop it in our mouth to climb back down and then prick it with two small holes and blow the contents out. My father took me to visit an old local gent who had a room full of huge shallow wooden drawers filled with hundreds of exotic and rare birds eggs. We lived around 50 km. from one of the most prolific desert nesting sites for rare Australian birds. A sparse remote area with salt pans and dead hollow trees everywhere. I wonder what happened to that amazing collection.

Shooting spoggies and rabbits with a slug gun !

Hot milk in stinky little bottles at recess time at school. Cold apples under a wet hessian bag to go with the milk. Sit in the " shelter shed " until you had finished.

School assembly Monday morning. Sing god save the queen, then march round the quadrangle in pairs and line up in front of class.

In my early teens I purchased a BSA bantam motor cycle for $10. Rode it everywhere. Wish I had it now. Later a Datsun 1200 ute with super fat tyres for $20. We used to take that out to the remote desert areas nearby and visit aboriginal camp grounds and burial sites. We would collect the brightly coloured flint shards left from aborigines carving axes and other tools from the stone around the camp fire. Treated the bone fragments of long past aborigines with great respect, even as hoonish teenagers.

Mid to late teens, drive hotted up Holdens & Fords over 100 KM. to main rural centre where we would do mainies ( driving up and down the main street trying to impress the girls....   ), go fishing during the day and the drive in at night to see John Trivolta & Olivia Newton Johns latest movie. Maybe see a band at a footy club caberet.

[zanadoo_56]

Asbestos was a good fire retardent.  I remember the holiday houses we stayed at over Christmases were made of asbestos because they weren't occupied all the time and were surrounded by gum trees and a lot of underbrush.

The last cubby house my father built was made with asbestos sheeting.  Later it was used for storage.  When my parents sold up my father wondered what the new homeowners owners were doing to do with the cubby as they didn't have any children.  It was going to cost a lot of money to demolish and remove.

[travlyn2012]

When petrol came in standard or super only. Petrol was around 35 cents a gallon (when I first started work). That’s roughly 8 cents a litre. For $4 or $5, most people could run their car for a week.

[serendipityricho]

-Fings aint wot they used t,be--Max Bygraves.

♫♪ Once our beer was frothy-now its frothy coffee -etc♫♪

[zanadoo_56]

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@travlyn2012wrote:
When petrol came in standard or super only. Petrol was around 35 cents a gallon (when I first started work). That’s roughly 8 cents a litre. For $4 or $5, most people could run their car for a week.

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Very true.  For a while I had a two cylinder car that took standard petrol.  $5 would definitely fill the tank.

[ambercat16]

I can remember tossing up between spending .50c on petrol for the VW or a packet of smokes!

haha f a g s was bleeped!

[kopenhagen5]

Little milk triangles given out at morning recess in primary school.

Playing marbles and knuckles.

And being the first to drink the cream at the top of the glass milk bottles delivered.

[janeababe]

• When roller skates buckled over your sand shoes 
• when joggers were once called sand shoes 😉
• when you drank straight from the garden tap or garden hose and NEVER died 😳😳 shock horror! 
• When you had to be home when the street lights came on.
• when baby travelled in a basinette on the back seat of the Holden! 
• When you and your mates would get together on weekends with a wheelbarrow and shovels and go looking for buried treasure 😂 Or just go scavenging at the local tip 😎
• When EVERY CHILD learned to drive a column shift 😁
• When food was real and fruit tasted like fruit. 
• Oh and don't forget when platform shoes and bell bottom jeans were fashionable 😘😘😘
• ......and then came the ankle socks with the little pom-pom at the back to stop it being swallowed  by your tennis shoes. (I loved those socks lol )
• swimming in the river, climbing trees, eating hot chips with vinegar and tomato sauce wrapped in newspaper, breaking into the married loaf of bread, calling your friends parents by Mr & Mrs. 

my oh my..... how times have changed. I'm not entirely convinced it's a better world. 

[redders_60]

This has been a very entertaining thread. I was most moved by Not For Sale's comment & Travlyn's reply. It is very true about what sticks in your mind from when you were a kid. As the only child of my parents we emigrated to Australia from London mid year 1968.

The grade 2 classroom I was stuck in (outer Melb suburbs new estate area) had 55 kids in the class & a cranky Scotswoman who only liked Scots born kids. I recall a tartan wearing girl named Heather Campbell being the "Teacher's Pet". The teacher was a Miss Campbell.

I had been accelerated to Grade 4 in England. My parents were told Australian schools were ranked by age only; Not ability. So there was I stuck in a classroom that held nothing for me. Jumbo crayons! Not pens to write with!  (Though Cuisinaire rods provided a new distraction in maths for a few days)

I was always a good reader; Yet the teacher gave me "John & Betty" to read (Yet never bothered to hear me read it!).  Being new & a shy quiet type of kid (red hair & glasses with a funny accent won me no friends) I just got on with it until the day the class was escorted to the school library.

I was happy to find a book I'd been halfway through reading when we left England. "The Lion; The Witch & The Wardrobe"  - I found where I'd left off reading & was avidly doing so when the horrid teacher snatched the book from my hands, saying "You can't read that!" - I was never asked nor was it checked if I could!  Not always positive!

Words cannot decribe how devastated my younger self felt to have found one thing that was constant in my newly changed world - Only to have it literally snatched from my hands!  Yes; Sometimes teachers play a greater role in children's lives than they know!

[travlyn2012]

When a Pump Up Scooter was the thing to own.

If you had 3 speed hub gears on your pushbike you were very privledged.

On Christmas mornings, all the kids in the street would be out playing with their new toys, cricket sets, scooters, bikes, hula hoops, etc. (Hardly ever see any kids in the streets now, most are probably in their bedroom playing with some tech game, phone or tablet.)

A family photo was often taken standing beside the family car.

Nobody owned a purebred dog.

School exams were done by using your brain. Not with calculators or electronic devices.