That’s the first Australian McDonald’s, which opened in Sydney the year before I was born. From what I can determine, the first McDonald’s in Newcastle opened when I was 7, and since it wasn’t far from where my Nan lived it was a frequent treat after we’d visit her house.
Since then I’ve eaten at Maccas hundreds of times, and over those 40+ years many memories have been made. Here’s a selection:
- As a child the McDonald’s calendar was an essential purchase! Not only did we hang it on our walls, we also coloured it in and – most importantly – we used the coupons every month to get free food!
- Happy Meals were my default order as a child, and the toys (in my memory) were much higher quality than today. I fondly remember some Star Wars stencils that could be used to draw characters, that I wish I’d kept to this day.
- Ice creams in those days were self-serve!
- Graduating to Big Macs was one moment in my life when I felt like an adult. I don’t remember who it was, but I was at Maccas with a friend once and he got a Big Mac and I ordered a ‘Junior Burger’ and he asked me why I didn’t eat Big Macs! This prompted me to try one and I never looked back 🙂
- Back when we had our paper run one time the newspaper came with Maccas coupons for free fries. We ended up with loads of them and I recall I had a lot of fries during the weeks that followed!
- During the 1984 Olympics I remember my group of friends used to go to Charlestown Maccas after school and watch the athletic events. A girl in my year was working there at the time and she used to surreptitiously give us free food.
- I used to love the cookies! Australia didn’t have a strong traditional of ‘animal crackers’ so we didn’t know that Maccas cookies were basically the same. Even well into my teens I used to get a box of these with my order and eat them on the bus home.
- I also used to enjoy their strawberry milkshakes, although I haven’t had one since I left Australia.
- In my last year of High School we organized a treasure hunt and one item on the list was ‘one point for every McDonald’s cheeseburger you bring us’ and we had loads delivered (as well as a phone call of complaint from a McDonald’s!). This was when microwaves were uncommon so we (me and the judges) ate a bunch for dinner and – to my shame – had to throw the rest away.
- The frozen cokes I’ve ordered at Australian McDonald’s. During my summer trips it wasn’t unusual for me to have two or three a day, but these past years – since I’ve traveled in winter – it’s usually been just one. It’s the best item on their menu 🙂
- When I first returned to Oz in 2000 I wrote a series of postcards on alternate days in the George street Maccas. Entitled ‘The McDonalds Series’, these are some of the oldest and most nostalgic postcards in my collection.
- During our trip to Germany we visited many McDonald’s, often not eating at all. The reason: I was hunting McDonald’s glasses with ‘coca cola’ written in various different languages!
- At a Maccas in Paris – on the Champs-Elysees to be specific – I ate breakfast very early and was the only diner in the restaurant. A man came and sat down right next to me and bowed his head until it hit the table. I quickly finished and left, and later that day my hotel concierge told me he was probably a homeless man looking to scavenge any food I may have left on the tray.
- I could do a blog post on Japanese Maccas memories alone, but two that stick out were the Superfries (read about them here) and not once but twice being seated at a very busy Maccas and finding myself sharing a table with a young ‘office lady’ working on her laptop!
- The memory I’m most proud of would be my 2022 achievement of seven identical orders in seven days at seven different Maccas (read about it here). Will I ever surpass this? No man yet knows…
So many years of McDonald’s! The irony is I almost never eat it in the USA since it’s usually awful here, but you can bet that any foreign trip I ever go on will include at least one stop at a Maccas. Let’s hope there’s many more memories to be made 🙂
