70 years sands of time

History is near and far. In my business as a trainee journalist we were told the public has a three day memory span so if your story had a history go back further than that then you had to go to the files and include past events.

There was another earlier lesson that has long gone past the sub-editors and that is you had to have how, when, there and why in the first three paragraphs of your story.

The reason for this was stories often came down by wire across on the clickety telex machine or by telegram. The distance of the message often was broken by the technology either the wires coming down or telegraph contact breaking so the idea was to have the basics of the story in three paragraphs and you could use the file system to fill the story out.

All that doesn't matter in today’s digital world although it would not hurt for some recognition.

Today we go on the 70 year memory span.

Fortunately our museum had long, gone workers with a foresight to keep copies of local newspapers hence we have the story sources to expand our local history much to the delight of some researchers and history buffs.

Among the newspaper covering important events is a collection of magazines covering generalities or public interest and this is where you get a feel for the history of our times.

A particular tome we are looking at today is The Australian Magazine A.M. — a four-color pictorial magazine put out by Consolidated Press which also published the Womens Weekly, the Bulletin (long gone) and of course, the Daily Telegraph.

The edition that brought back a flood of memories was a 1954 one which had the £150 all metal caravan advert.

The motor of choice was the HI International fashionable Family Transport station wagon which from the photographs, looked as if it would probably tow a tank!

Of course you had to have your box brownie as this camera was called. It used film in those days which had to be processed so is cost you for the film and then also cost you to see what was on it - regardless whether you had stuffed it up by having the lens cap still on!

In 1954 if you were going overseas you would usually clamour to book a cabin on the Crack new Liner for Australia the P&O 29,600 ton Iberia capable of carrying 1414 passengers. Today the latest from P&O is the Arvia, which boasts a gross tonnage of 184,700 and a capacity for 5200 passengers.

Australia was served by three British (of course) shipping lines; P&O, Shaw Savill and Orient Line.

To go from Sydney to Melbourne (return) by train cost £14/3/0; ($660 in today’s money); £17/10/0 ($807) by sea and £18 ($830) by air).

In 1954 Sydney’s airport (Kingsford Smith Airport) Mascot was the busiest outside the United States and was being enlarged to take 2m passengers a year — last year the airport handles 14.6m passengers.

We will finish off on a musical note with the local columnist Kim Keane taking a swipe at the new high fidelity of records and how people now argued about the quality of the sound.

To quote: It appears that Americans now spend more on tickets for concerts and symphonies than they do on tickets for baseball games. Music over there has reached 'the billion dollar category'. Juke boxes and their records were sold last year to the tune of 300,000,000 dollars and the new hifi (high-fidelity recordings) craze concerned mainly with serious music on long-playing records, is expected to equal that figure this year.

There you go mum . . . keep up with the times! .