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The Granite Island Chairlift, installed in 1964 and removed in 1996. Photo courtesy of Alex Prichard on Flickr

Adelaide Now’s Book Review

Adelaide Now publishes more photos and memories from “Adelaide Remember When”, the book Adelaide Now, the online edition of the Advertiser has shown some more of the photos and stories from my newly published book Adelaide Remember When. The book contains more than 300 photos of Adelaide, some never before published, from the 1950s to […]

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Photo from The Tram Museum Adelaide. A tram coming through the underpass on Goodwood Road at Millswood in 1956. Trams were Adelaide’s main form of public transport for some 30 years from 1925 until 1958 when on the 22nd of November that year the last tram left Victoria Square bound for Cheltenham.

You Must Remember This…..

ADELAIDE REMEMBER WHEN….The Book “Memories are better than diamonds and nobody can steal them from you”. So wrote Rodman Philbrick in “The Last Book in the Universe”. This is a book full of diamonds, a collection of the most popular memoirs and photographs from the nostalgia lovers of the ‘Adelaide Remember When’ Facebook website, ranging […]

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There were picture theatres in every suburb. This is the Ozone on Kensington Road at Marryatville, later known as the Chelsea and now the Regal

Saturday Arvo at the Pictures

An important tradition of growing up in Adelaide from the 50s was the Saturday afternoon pictures at the local picture theatre, town hall or flea pit. There were always two full length pictures, an episode of the serial, a cartoon and a Pete Smith Special to watch while eating your Jaffas, Fantales or a Dandy […]

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Photo courtesy of Dale Sanders. An original radiogramme with automatic record changer

From the Radiogram to the Walkman.

Vinyl records, radiograms, transistors and cassette recorders … what fun we had before computers! Vinyl record sales in Australia have increased by almost 100 per cent this year. It seems a younger generation has rediscovered the world of “fantastic black plastic” in the digital age. I asked one of  my (much) younger colleagues why he […]

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Photo from Wikipedia. , Australia’s ‘micro car’, manufactured by Lightburn industries, the Zeta Sedan

Adelaide’s Other Car, The Lightburn Zeta.

I must confess to some fascination about Adelaide’s ‘other car’ the Lightburn Zeta. As a city we have a proud reputation in automotive production with Holden and Chrysler cars but back in the 60s, there was also a third car, Australia’s ‘micro car’, manufactured by Lightburn industries which had, until 1963, manufactured tools, cement mixers, […]

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Photo thanks to 'Down Memory Lane With Noel O'Connor'. Driver Bob Wente takes the chequered flag at Rowley Park Speedway. And is that a young Glen Dix

More Memories of the “Pughole”

Following my column in the Advertiser ‘Boomer’ magazine recently on Rowley Park Speedway, Advertiser photographer Barry O’Brien wrote in to the paper with his own memories of “those adrenalin-pumping nights at the dirt track”. Barry started photographing Rowley Park, also known as “the pughole”,  for the newspaper in 1958 and attended the track on regular […]

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Photo from Google Images. Manual switchboard operators at work in 1952

Your First Job. Does It Still Exist?

Is the first job you ever had still in existence today? Telegram boys, lift operators, milkmen, comptometrists, typists, tea ladies, linotype operators, petrol pump attendants, tram conductors, manual switchboard operators and the lavatory man have all disappeared as jobs since the 50s. I started my first job at 15 working for the PMG delivering telegrams […]

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Photo from State Library of South Australia.

Johnnies Christmas Pageant, an Adelaide Tradition

Remember going to your very first John Martin’s Christmas Pageant? The much loved event is now sponsored by the South Australian Credit Unions but the original ‘Johnnies’ pageant had it’s beginnings in 1931 when Sir Edward Hayward visited the United States and Canada and came up with the idea of a Christmas parade through the […]

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