The world has changed very much in my lifetime and continues to change. The following recollections (looking back and recalled 60 years later) may be of interest to those born in very different times and in times to come.
I grew up in Geelong, a regional city in the state of Victoria about 80 kms from Melbourne.
As mentioned in my family history, my father died in 1953 when I was 3 years old. At the time we lived at 15 Darling St in East Gelong. Our family survived on my mother's widow's pension and her part-time work at the ABC Cafe in Geelong. Some years later my mother re-married and we moved across town to 27 Upper Skene St, Newtown in mid-1959.
While living in East Geelong we did not have a car (my step-father did have one so our family had access to a car after my mother re-married in late 1957). We did not have a telephone until we moved to Newtown. (Of course I am referring to a landline as mobile phones had not been invented and the internet did not exist) We did not have a refrigerator until we moved to Newtown. Instead in East Geelong we had an ice-chest for storing some food items, which required the regular delivery of a large block of ice which then slowly melted in its special compartment and kept the contents of the ice-chest cool. Household waste was collected weekly by means of a large horse-drawn cart.
We had a radio but no television. Television only came to my home state of Victoria in time for the Melbourne Olympic games in 1956. Although we did not obtain a television set until 1962 after we moved to Newtown, our next-door neighbours the Walters family did have one. I often spent time in their home as they had a son Don who was about my age and we often played together. The introduction of TV presented me with an awkward dilemma. I was very interested in viewing 'Cartoon Carnival' a program that commenced at 6pm which was also the time I was expected home for the evening meal. It was a difficult balancing act to work out how much of the program I could watch before scrambling over the fence back home hoping dinner was delayed enough for me to avoid a scolding!
Heating in the home was by means of an open fire in the kitchen which also served as the dining room and living room. The front room was reserved for entertaining visitors and we children were discouraged from entering there. I shared a bedroom with my two older brothers, the front bedroom was for my parents, the 'girls room' was in a bedroom at the back of the house that was probably added to the original building. Whilst the toilet was in the house, it could only be accessed from outside via the backyard. Hot water was obtained through the burning of briquettes in a hot water service. The briquettes were also used along with logs of wood in the open fire which was started with newspaper and some smaller kindling wood.
During school holidays on Mondays I was conscripted to help with the laundry. There was an electric washing machine but the clothes etc then had to be passed through a hand operated wringer to squeeze out the excess water. A process that was repeated twice more as the laundry had to be passed through two additional troughs for rinsing and colour preservation, before being pegged out on the clothes line in our back yard.
A range of vegetables were grown in our backyard - tomatoes, beans, potatoes, carrots, beetroot, broccoli and lettuce. We also had several fruit trees for growing apples, apricots and plums, and a set of chooks in a pen ensured a regular supply of eggs. Bread was delivered to the house by a baker's van each day and milk was also delivered. A set of empty one-pint bottles were put out each night and replaced by a corresponding set of full bottles in the morning delivery. I also recall sitting on the handlebars of my brothers bicycle when we rode to a nearby dairy to fill up a container with milk on occasions when we ran out.
I was not conscious that our home or lifestyle was very different from that of our neighbours. There seemed more of a community spirit back then and I can still recall the names of most of the households in our street and even a couple of nearby streets. I have mentioned the Walters at No.17. Our neighbours on the other side at No.13 were Mrs Scott and her unmarried sister. They were both elderly but used to look after myself and my younger sister when we returned from school and while waiting for my mother to come home from work.
The names of others in the street were Owen, Sylvester, Braim, Salter, Watson, Rowe, Baker, Doherty, Chandley, Fletcher, White, Grace, Hockaday, Stewart and Bingham. In the nearby streets were Kelly, Bamford, Byers, Coleman and Ackroyd. All very Anglo-Saxon names. The post-WWII European migrants were concentrated mainly in the northern suburbs of Norlane and Bell Park, and only a handful attended the local Catholic parish primary school (St Margaret's) that I attended. It was only when I moved to secondary school that I met students of Italian, Polish Dutch and Croatian descent who were drawn from a range of primary schools in the city. There were no students of Asian descent. The Vietnamese arrived in Australia following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.
Other grocery items were usually purchased locally - there were three grocery stores within easy walking distance of our home and a couple of butcher shops. I was often sent to one or other of the shops (Lander's, Bull's or Lowther's for groceries and Whitley's or Valentine's for meat) with some money and a note listing the items for purchase which was handed to the proprietor.
As the above recollections indicate, we lived in a very safe neighbourhood where doors were usually left unlocked. Crime was not an issue.