The stars must be in a particularly significant alignment, as this last week has sent me back to remembering times past and even receiving, quite out of the blue, a communication from a childhood friend, who I have not seen nor heard from in over fifty years.
She sent me this photo of us all as children in Woods Point
Then there was the documentary on ABC TV, Whitlam: The Power & The Passion which heady period I remember very well. Gough Whitlam will always be my favourite Prime Minister and I recall how it felt when he won the 1972 election. A friend remarked at the time “Even the stars look different…” And too, how angry and betrayed we all felt when he was toppled. The documentary captured the period vividly, and I wept once more when Gough spoke his famous words
“Well, may we say, “God Save the Queen” because nothing will save the Governor General”.
If ever there was a time to flog off my old posters from the Dismissal era, it is now. But I can’t bring myself to part with them.
That was the 1970s, however, stumbling across an old issue of the Melbourne University newspaper Farrago, I was transported back to the 1960s, 1967 in particular.
What struck me as I browsed through the pages of this ancient artefact, was how typical of the times was the content of the issue, which featured Prosh Week 1967.
What amused me the most, was the ads.
Genevieve was a cafe in Faraday Street Carlton where in those days you could purchase a coffee for 10 cents and a spaghetti bolognaise for 50 cents, staple food for the poor students we were at the time.
Peter Poynton’s was a popular drinking hole, also in Carlton, where my friends and I spent many a happy hour.
The Love In was a colourfully painted establishment on the corner of Faraday and Drummond Streets Carlton. As a group of us lived just up the road from it we naturally entered its portals to groove on the light shows, listen to the music and watch movies. It all looks rather innocent by today’s standards, serving only coffee and snacks and nothing stronger. We hadn’t at that stage indulged in any mind expanding drugs, alcohol being the drug of preference then.
The scanned page below has a review of the Love In written in somewhat purple prose.
You wish…
One of Carlton’s cultural establishments – Mondo Music, where you could buy the latest records. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band was hot that year.
Discurio was still going strong up to last year when it was sold to the Title Group (whoever they are).
Live music
Computer Dating 1960s style!
I wasn’t aware that you could become a computer programmer in the 1960s, though I do remember seeing CSIRAC or its successor, through a window in the Physics Department.
Cheap hair cuts and smokes
And look at the cost to travel for 30 days in China in 1967!
I remember 1967 as one of the best year’s of my life. It was full of parties, craziness and wild living and I met life long friends whom I still see frequently. Others have passed away, others beyond my ken.
Here’s an excerpt from my diary, describing what we did for Prosh Week in August 1967.
Prosh Day yesterday was quite exciting, though we must have got carried away for we did some mad things. We did a wild hippy dance and love in demonstration in the Town Square, charged through the streets of Melbourne, yelling “love, love love”, ate flowers for TV camera men (and we didn’t even get onto the news!). It seemed quite successful in all. There were students everywhere down the street, swarming in and out of shops, rattling cans on street corners – it felt good to be a student. There was a sort of comradeship about them all. People whom one would never approach normally, were old friends. It was like a mad kaleidoscope dream, but all was deflated, flat by the end of the day.
The stern old Anne of today frowns on such frivolous behaviour, but I was so much younger then and lived life to the hilt in the fabulous 1960s.
