Do You Remember?

[Big Rob]

Coca Cola and Fanta yo yo's. The ones to get were the red Coca Cola and the black Coca Cola super yo yo...... Walk the dog, rock the cradle, rocket ship, dog bite, around the world ......

I remember we were living in Manly, Sydney in 1974 when colour TV came to Australia. After school we would all race over to the Retrovision store to watch the colour TV's on display through the front window.

"Retrovision, first for colour TV" was how the ad went.

Our first colour TV was a Rank Arena which dad bought when we moved to Townsville in 1976. Ours was remote control.... Dad would tell me to get up and change the Chanel or turn the volume up and I would do it..... We could choose between Chanel 2 (abc), Chanel 0, Chanel 7 and Chanel 9. Unless you were in the country and only had 2 chanels.

We also went to the grand opening of the Opera House while in Manly in 1973..... I also collected Scanlens footy cards and Bobby Fulton was my favourite player for the Sea Eagles. I would ride to school on my metallic green Malvern Star dragster with T bar three speed and banana seat with sissy bar.

I'm restoring a Malvern Star Dragstar at the moment for my wife. I managed to find a good one in red and hers was originally red, so that was a bonus. Hers didn't have the stick shift, but I've got one now and am thinking about fitting it, although she doesn't care either way. Medium sissy bar and a white metallic vinyl banana seat with flowers on it. I hope to have it ready for her birthday in March.

[Taily]

Sydneysider memories again... Besser Block incinerators in just about every backyard in suburbia.

Golden Breed, Crystal Cyliders, Billabong and Rip Curl when they first kicked-off their clothing ranges.

Paula Duncan..... Hmmmmmm

Norman Gunston interviews.

A slack-jawed kid of 13 or so watching Blondie sing Heart of Glass (or something similar) on the tele - to me, nobody else!

Sammy Sparrow/Garry O'Callaghan on the radio.

Casey Casom (I believe he still syndicates American Top 40).

Roy's Roast Duck at Baulkham Hills.

The Red S supermarket at Winston Hills, shopping either went home in paper bags or was delivered for you.

Cut Price Food barn.... Where do ya geddit?

My old man bitching about having to pay 29.9 cpl for super (standard pings like a b*****d he muttered) at the Total servo in Baulkham Hills again.

SOLO service stations.

Dad always had either Pablo or Maxwell House coffee in his work ute. Building sites always had two or three fellas wandering around with Makita caps on...

Home delivery Buttercup bread (in the white/blue/yellow pannos), orange/silver/red foil tops on milk bottles and the inch (or more) of cream on top of the home-delivered milk. You'd have to get the bottles inside pretty quick in the morning if there were crows about as they'd get into the milk. Milk money so innocently left in empty milk bottles out at everyone's from gates overnight for the milko (with the cow-moo horn) to pick-up during his rounds. Some kids worked out it was an easy pocket money source...

Joe Hasham - Electronic Sales and Rentals ads on TV.

Tony Packard's "Up the Windsor Road" ads

Backyard cricket, or even down the park at the bottom of my street where kids from far and wide would congegate and we'd have our own "World Series Cricket" where each kid would be their cricket hero - there'd be a "Joel Garner", a "Clive Lloyd", a "Marshie" etc and any other cricketer you could imagine. Fights would break out if someone dared take your "name".

Throwdowns.

Foil ashtrays on the tables of McDonalds, along with Southern Fried Chicken, McFeast etc.

My Commonwealth bank book had manual entries and was stamped by the teller each time.

Farmland where now stands thousands of homes, massive industial estates where I used to blat around on my first trailbike in the early/mid 80s.

Drive-ins when I was old enough..

Catching the train into town and sneaking into the Coogee Bay Hotel to go and see some Aussie band. That just happened to be Cold Chisel...

More groups/bands I saw (some of them many times) in the mid to late 80's: Mental as Anything, The Angels, Rose Tattoo, The Black Sorrows, Johnny Diesel and the Injectors, Dragon, Gangajang, The Hoodoo Gurus, The Radiators (I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair....), Midnight Oil, Noiseworks, Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls. I think the only O/S artist I forked out to see was Robert Palmer at the "Ent Cent" as Doug Mulray used to refer to it. There were many other (lesser known) local bands - The Party Pigs etc etc. We were spoilt for live music and venues then.

I need to stop writing this, life was so much more "simple" then.

[Big Rob]

And I repeat my quote from a few nights ago.....

"This is the best thread ever......."

Talk about refreshing all my old memories, I had a bad accident back in April '13 and have been suffering all kinds of memory loss. You have no idea how much this thread is helping me.

Thank you everyone!

[Alien DNA]

I remember the milk bottles with foil caps....man that was the best tasting milk ever!!! Nowadays it all tastes watered down and horrible!!

Glad this thread is helping Rob. Lets hope it keeps going

[Frosty]

Speed traps with two strips across the road.Measuring distance traveled by the number of empty Emu Bitter cans? Didn't really do that

[Wally]

Let's see if we can stir a few more cobwebbed over memories .

Tony Barbar

Greenbottle

[wbute]

Green pay phones for STD calls and Red phones for local calls.
Going to Dubbo with Mum and Dad in the HJ station wagon in the middle of summer with no air conditioning or a radio. Sticking to the vinyl seats that were about three hundred degrees. Some things are better left in the 70's. I wonder how we would all cope with that these days ?

[Wally]

Green pay phones for STD calls and Red phones for local calls.
Going to Dubbo with Mum and Dad in the HJ station wagon in the middle of summer with no air conditioning or a radio. Sticking to the vinyl seats that were about three hundred degrees. Some things are better left in the 70's. I wonder how we would all cope with that these days ?

I think most of us who have lived that era would give our eye teeth to go back in time . Ahh those were the days , when men were men and sheep were scared .

[wbute]

Anyone remember BUGA UP who started in 79 defacing billboards advertising cigarettes? They used to make me laugh when we went to Sydney.

[Dr Terry]

Again of no real consequence but I got to reading.

The Beginning

Television Wollongong Transmission Limited (TWT), was incorporated on 4 October 1955 by a group of local businessmen. Five years later, it was awarded a licence by the Postmaster-General's Department broadcast to the Illawarra and South Coast regions, over a number of other groups aligned to Sydney-based stations ATN-7 and TCN-9.[3] The new station was to broadcast on the VHF-4 frequency, using the callsign WIN (which stood for Wollongong (and the) Illawarra Network or alternatively Wollongong Illawarra New (South Wales), in line with other Australian callsigns). Soon after, a plot of land was purchased at Fort Drummond, approximately two kilometres south of the Wollongong central business district, for the station's television studios.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIN_Television

Saying the WIN Network would be like saying PIN number. Wollongong Illawarra Network Network or Personal Identifying Number Number.

ATM Machine anyone ?

Just Saying.

I spend 6 months working in the PMG radio branch (as part of my tech training) where all this stuff is licensed, they are so damn pedantic.

Again, Wikipedia is full of errors, it is at best a guide, not to be relied upon.

Dr Terry