Life was so much simpler in black and white days

Today, I am channelling my inner Peter Begg.

Peter’s regular columns engage us in different aspects of Geelong’s rich history – long may they continue.

My foray into history is of a different nature, prompted by the recent gift of a pristine copy of “Geelong News” dated Friday February 11, 1977. At 40 pages, this was the bumper weekend edition.

As a random snapshot back to a different century and a vastly different era, I found the paper absolutely fascinating.

The “Geelong News” was the successor to Dick Horniblow’s “Belmont and Highton News” and “Geelong Suburban News”.

The paper is fully black and white – no colour on newsprint in those days. In fact, at that time, colour TVs were only just coming into the mainstream but you could rent one from the Barwon Electrical Centre for just 79 cents per day.

Car sales dominated much of the advertising, featuring such iconic but long gone dealerships as Laurie Ogle Motors, Peck and Stokes, Folks Motors, Brown Murphy and Merko Datsun.

And you could buy a brand new Skoda 110L sedan for just $3725 plus on road costs.

Real estate also featured heavily. I won’t depress you too much with the land and housing prices, but you could buy a three-year-old 30sq m brick home on “six gently sloping acres” at Leopold, complete with an “orange laminated servery” (back in fashion soon) for $108,000.

As for front page news, none other than local government controversy – some things just refuse to change.

The lead story concerned the shock suspension by the then South Barwon Shire Council of their Town Clerk – a sorry tale, it seemed.

This edition also featured three pages to celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee, a folk festival at the fledgling Deakin University, the Geelong West Technical School Band tour to Europe, together with the ubiquitous baby and wedding photos.

The journalistic language used was clearly of a bygone era, laced with what we could now deem sexist and other cringe-worthy sentiments. Much of this would certainly not cut the mustard today but probably – sadly – washed over us back then as just normal lingo.

But there were also significant national issues running at the time.

The country was still reeling somewhat after the November 11,

1975 dismissal of the Whitlam government but the election late in 1977 delivered another substantial majority to Malcolm Fraser’s Coalition, after which Whitlam resigned as Opposition Leader.

One bright note was the Fraser government’s open, compassionate acceptance of Vietnamese refugees at the time, a far cry from Australia’s more recent refugee policies.

Looking back 46 years to 1977, life in all its black and white glory seemed so much simpler than now – less hurried, no internet, people still hand-wrote letters and the like.

Yet, while we can allow ourselves to occasionally reminisce, our life is now and we cannot live in the past. John F Kennedy wisely said “History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.”