Category: History

Life’s Great Adventure

  • May 12, 2022

How many times have I traveled internationally? And where have I gone? The list has become long (and old) enough that I’m starting to forget. Time to refresh my memory!

My first trip was when I was a swaddling babe, and we went as a family from PNG to Germany (that’s us upon arrival in 1972), staying for several months and then jetting back to Australia to live. I don’t of course remember this, but until I left Australia at age 21 this was the first time I ever flew.

In 1993 (when the above was taken), I jetted to the USA with a suitcase full of books and records and very few clothes! I don’t remember much of the trip now, but it remains the only one-way air ticket I’ve ever bought myself. It would be seven more years before I flew again.

In late December 2000 I flew back to Australia, and what a trip it was! The years had changed me, but looking at the above photo (taken in early January 2001) I can’t say for sure what I had become! I had a great time and – since this was pre-blog – even wrote a mini travelogue book about it. I knew this wasn’t to be my last trip abroad, and the travel bug had most definitely bitten.

Including the above trip, and in the years since, here’s where and when I’ve traveled internationally. I’ve listed this chronologically, and the Australia trips usually span the end of the listed year and into the next:

  • Australia (2000)
  • Canada (2001)
  • Japan (2002)
  • Japan (2004)
  • Japan (2006)
  • Australia (2006)
  • Puerto Rico (2008)
  • Australia (2008)
  • Japan (2009)
  • Australia (2009)
  • England (2010)
  • Australia (2010)
  • Australia (2011)
  • Australia (2012)
  • Japan (2013)
  • Canada (2013)
  • Australia (2013)
  • Australia (2014)
  • Ireland (2015)
  • England (2015)
  • France (2015)
  • Germany (2015)
  • Australia (2015)
  • England (2016)
  • Australia (2016)
  • Japan (2017)
  • Australia (2017)
  • Scotland (2018)
  • Australia (2018)
  • Japan (2019)
  • Australia (2019)
  • Japan (2020)

2015 was a year wasn’t it?! I visited five countries, and flew over 70,000 miles in that year alone! Looking at this list makes me regret not signing up for frequent flyer rewards a long time ago, but in my defense I always hopped airlines going with the cheapest, whereas these days I choose comfort instead!

That’s a lot of international trips, and the list includes 40 long-haul Pacific flights. I have memories of all of these, although to be true the many Oz trips tend to blur into one! Critics may say I go to the same places too often (Australia 14 times! Japan 8 times!) but I go where I want to be, and I hope the many trips I will take in my life return to those destinations again 🙂

Here’s where I’ve been in map form:

And since you’re wondering, travel snaps can show how my look changed during these years…

There’s me in Japan in 2006. I chose this photo because I was astonished to learn I still have this shirt!

Here’s me in Canada in 2013, playing with a photo mode of the digital camera I had in those days. My head looks fat!

England in 2016. I’m growing into my mature self here. And I wish I had those fish’n’chips in front of me right now!

And that’s me on my last day in Japan in 2020. You can tell in my eyes I knew about Covid at this point, and I was wondering when I’d be able to travel again after returning to the USA the very next day. I doubt I would have believed it would be over two years.

After a failed attempt last December, next week will be the day I once again hop on a plane and jet off for foreign shores. For the fifteenth times since moving to the USA, I will once again return to Australia. For obvious reasons the trip will be different from the usual, but I hope not drastically. As usual, you can read about my adventures here on the blog.

World Book

  • May 5, 2022

Back in the late 1970s dad briefly worked as a door-to-door salesperson for World Book encyclopedia. In those days World Book was sold exclusively via door-to-door sales and the company actively recruited teachers since the encyclopedia was marketed toward families with children in schools. Dad apparently wasn’t great at the job, but it led to our family receiving a full set of World Book, which would have likely been prohibitively expensive for us otherwise.

Recently I found in an ‘abandoned book’ pile a copy of the 1964 edition of the F volume of World Book. Flipping through it brings back a lot of memories since when we were kids this was our Wikipedia. If ever we needed to know anything, the answer was in our World Books!

F is 512 pages long, most of which are black and white, and the above is representative of most entries. The writing is succinct and the vocabulary easy, and it’s clear this attempts to be a comprehensive reference that doesn’t bog down with technical details.

Since it’s catered (if not aimed) at children, the entry for fractions is many times longer than the one for force and organizations such as 4H and Future Farmers of America have much longer and detailed entries than I would have expected.

As a child I read all the volumes voraciously, and especially loved the lengthy showcase entries with lots of colour. Examples in this volume include flag (there’s more than a dozen pages like the above), flower and fish:

Farm has a long and comprehensive entry, but perhaps surprisingly the longest one in this volume is furniture with 16 pages.

The most spectacular entry is frog, since it includes an anatomical drawing featuring transparent overlays. I remember several volumes had these in them and as a child these were dazzling (and the plastic hadn’t warped as it has in this nearly 60-year-old volume).

Of course this was a legitimate encyclopedia, and not just intended for school report projects. As such it includes plenty of entries perhaps not of interest to the average child:

It’s also a time capsule of 1960s America. I only skimmed through it, but I found quite a few items that would likely be different in a 2022 edition, such as this introduction to fur:

Or a six-page article on fallout and fallout shelters:

There’s also an article on faith healing that very nearly flat-out says it is legitimate medicine, and the entry on Florida mentions (factually, in 1964) that it was the most politically democratic US state. An article on factories discusses how they can beautify neighborhoods and the free enterprise article goes into some detail about how Americans are the most prosperous, healthy and happy citizens in the world…

Warts-and-all, World Book was an incredible resource to us as children, and I have many happy memories of reading the volumes almost cover to cover. In preparing this entry I was astonished to learn it still exists as a physical resource, and you can buy the 2022 edition today for a mere $999!

One of the joys of using these as a child was reading all the other articles you pass by on the way to the one you’re looking for. I hope that kids today, with Wikipedia likely the principle resource for their school reports, haven’t lost the joy of learning just for it’s own sake by browsing through an encyclopedia.

Frozen Novelties (Part 3)

  • April 30, 2022

Since the second installment was six years ago, I think we’re long overdue for another post about licensed Australian ‘ice blocks’ from the good old days.

I remember these well. We were of course excited to have a new Star Wars themed ice block to suck on, but the inclusion of ‘Jedi jelly’ was a misstep! It was a strange semisolid material, half gummy and half jelly/jello and I recall it was very unpleasant to eat. I’m sure I preferred the older Star Wars ice blocks, and from what I read they were still available alongside the newer ROTJ version.

I have a very dim memory of the above, which was a standard choc-top style ice cream with doctor who branding. Apparently this was released in the 1980s and exclusive to ice cream freezers in shops (you couldn’t buy a box of them at the supermarket). That’s the wrapper on the right, with a stunning likeness of Tom Baker!

This is an interesting item since it was unique to Australia (the UK Who ‘ice lolly’ was different) and representative once again of how important licensed products were back then and how popular Doctor Who was in Australia.

Stickers were a polar inclusion in several series of iceblock, including Buck Rogers, The Bionic Man and the above (that’s one of the six spider man stickers on the right). It seems if you bought a box at a supermarket there would be a sticker inside, but if you bought an ice block at a corner store the owner had to give you the sticker. I’m sure I had a few, and possibly even still do in my sticker collection up in the attic!

I recall eating one of these at Charlestown Pool. I don’t remember the flavours, but I seem to remember the shapes lacked the detail shown in the marketing photo, and the colors ran when they melted. It was always fun to eat a messy ice block at the pool or beach, get it all over yourself, then go for a swim to wash it away 🙂

The Agro ice block is quintessentially Australian, and based around a wisecracking TV puppet popular with kids. It’s an obvious Bubble’o’Bill knockoff, but apparently was successful enough that Agro even had a second licensed ice cream!

As for Garfield… that damn cat was everywhere in the 1980s, including apparently in the ice block freezer! Toffee ice cream was a popular flavor in those days, and I reckon I must have ate one at least one of these once.

The more I looked the more I found, and the stranger and more unlikely the licenses became. The Mash ice block is particularly bizarre, and isn’t that almost Bob Hawke on the wrapper?!?

Some more licensed examples from the late 1970s and 1980s (apparently the fad lasted until about 1985). The Dracula one ‘bled’ and was similar to a product of the same name sold in the UK. The Space Invaders product reused old molds of ice blocks from the mid 70s named ‘Moonies’ and the Ultra Magnus one may not have actually made it to market (that’s an advertising sheet).

As for the Skippy one… it is apparently a product from the 1960s but that one image is all I can find on it! There also seems to have been Australian ice blocks for Happy Days, The A Team, Pac Man and King Kong but I can’t find any images (and suspect they were all identical to versions sold in the UK).

Not licensed, but nostalgic. Mint choc wedges were best, and I recall ‘Pepe’ well but would never have remembered the name! In fact I don’t eat much ice cream these days but wouldn’t say no to a frosty Pepe right now!

The above is a photo of an ad for a British ‘ice lolly’. I include it since I have a strong memory of an Australian ice cream also having a shaped stick, but I can’t find any evidence online. Do any of my readers recall anything of the sort from our youths?

And lastly in the previous post I mentioned my memories of an ice block with heat sensitive wrapper that displayed monster pictures and I’m pleased to say I’ve found it! This image is from a British advert for ‘Wall’s Magic Monster’ which suggests it was a similarly-named product by Pauls in Australia.

I vividly recall a day at Charlestown Pool digging wrappers out of garbages to collect the monsters, and ending up with quite the collection. I recall there were three different pictures, and I believe I cut them out of the wrappers and traded extras with friends for who-knows-what? I kept three good examples for many, many years, possibly right up until I left Oz. I used to keep them pressed between the pages of a book, but have no idea which book or what happened to it.

I bet they’re still there today…