Step back in time
One family has travelled back in time to experience the transformation of Aussie life from postwar austerity to the tech-age. Annabel Crabb and The Weekly’s Genevieve Gannon went along for the life-changing ride.
From out the front, the Ferrone family home looks thoroughly modern. The structure is square, streamlined and painted in shades of grey. In the garden water cascades from a sleek fountain the shape of a bullet. It is an urbane object of pride. But this is no ordinary house. This two-story dwelling in Sydney’s quiet south-west has been turned into a time machine.
When The Weekly arrives for our first set visit to the ABC reality documentary Back in Time for Dinner, we step into the lounge room and back in time to post-war Australia. Crossing the threshold is like popping out the end of a worm hole into our grandparents’ house – dark wood chairs are upholstered in gold brocade, rose patterns adorn the cushions and framed sepia photos and antique crystalware sit atop a wood-panel radiogram.
“I wanted to unbolt everything and take it home,” gushes the show’s host, Annabel Crabb, who is dressed in a 50s-inspired pleated skirt.
Annabel is on hand to oversee a family of five’s journey from past to present as they live in a different decade each week. From the dismissal of the Whitlam government and the moon landing, to the arrival of rotary phones and dial-up internet and beyond, they will experience Australian history firsthand.
“You can read history and you can learn history and you can know in your brain that when the ’50s started butter was rationed and people ate dripping, but to watch people living like that is a different thing,” Annabel says.
“It’s like being transported there, watching how people lived their lives – the frustrations and also the liberations associated with not having this mad profusion of stuff we have in the modern age.”
As the show’s title suggests, food is central to the experiment. Waves of Asian vegetables and Italian dishes marked immigration patterns, and developments like dishwashers and microwave dinners signposted social evolution, as working women had less time to perform their traditional roles of cook and cleaner.
“It is hard work and very different from our life now,” says Carol
Ferrone, the mother in the experiment, of her life in the 1950s.
We cross into the small, kitsch kitchen that has been retro-fitted into the existing house, and marvel at the beautiful mint-green fridge and how cramped the space is. The cabinetry is periwinkle blue and red trimmed in yellow. “It felt like a bit of a jail sentence,” Carol says. It is a very pretty prison.
The family is mid-way through 1950s week and Carol has been spending every waking moment hand-washing the family’s laundry in boiling water, and cooking every morsel of food from scratch, all while wearing heels, pearls and a full face of make-up.
Her daughters, Olivia, 10, and Sienna, 14, help a little but the men, husband Peter and son, Julian, 18, are under strict instructions to observe the gender roles of the day and not lift a finger.
“For me, the ’50s were definitely very isolating,” Carol says. “We live in an open-plan home and we share everything, whether it’s cooking or cleaning up. In the ’50s, we didn’t even have dinner together, which I found very hard.”
The culinary offerings in 1950 are remarkably bland. “There wasn’t even any salt,” says Peter. “No snacks.”
Inside the fridge is a slab of butter wrapped in waxed paper and tied with string. The olive oil – a rarity – was purchased at the pharmacy. The attention to detail is exquisite. Each food item looks like a work of art. But it wasn’t all pretty.
“We had to eat tripe!” says a scandalised Olivia.
Dripping was another unpopular food option. Julian didn’t mind it, but the verdict on the tripe is unanimous, and summed up succinctly by
Olivia: “Bleagh.”
Despite what the family might think, the offal wasn’t chosen to torture them. “There’s a historical reason for tripe being a big dish of
the ’50s,” Annabel says. “When beef was rationed in World War Two, people had to look for other forms of protein and what happened in Australia is people started eating offal and actually really liked it. It’s a taste that really persisted past the rationing years.”
Three months after our first visit, The Weekly returns to an unrecognisable Ferrone family home. The orange melamine and the red shag rug of the ’70s are gone and in their place is tasteful carpet and a white stone kitchen bench that allows for freeflowing conversation with whoever is in the open-plan dining room. The Ferrone family has tried fondue and even eaten futuristic food in the form of meat and three veg reduced down into gummy lollies.
The family agrees they found the ’50s the most challenging week of the experiment.
“I was extremely surprised,”
Carol says. “I think I was expecting the ’50s to be all ball gowns and dances. I shed a few tears in the ’50s.”
For Peter, who loves to cook for his family, sitting in the dining room alone for dinner was unexpectedly difficult. “The ’50s was, here is your role and that’s what you’re expected to do. For me, being segregated was very hard,” he says.
Annabel says it was interesting to observe how significantly the design of a home shapes the lives of the people who live in it.
“You don’t really understand that gradual evolution of gender roles until you’re thrown back into a situation where you’ve got to live the old way and see what effect that has on your life and sensibilities,” she says. Despite the jarringly regimented gender roles, the freedom from technology gave the already tight-knit family a chance to bond.
“We had some of our best times in the ’50s, too,” says Carole. “Because there was no TV, we had some great times together. The kids would spend time playing board games, playing outside and skipping. Olivia loves art and loves to draw and paint. So what does a ’50s child do that doesn’t have a TV and an Xbox and a phone? Draw and paint.”
Olivia relished playing board games with her older brother and sister, whose attention was no longer being held hostage by iPhones and iPads. A family trip to the Drive In was a highlight for the youngest member of the experiment. “My favourite was definitely the Drive In because we had milkshakes,” she says.
Another firm favourite was rollerskating in the 1970s.
“We were all reluctant to do it and wanted to pull out because we don’t skate,” Carol says. “I’m paranoid of people breaking limbs and I was just so proud of us and we were so excited that we actually did it. That had to be a highlight because we did it together.”
Julian was thrilled when a Commodore 64 appeared in their
’80s house, but frustrated his sister Sienna when his exploration of early dial-up internet meant she couldn’t use the landline.
The food featured in the program reflects changes of the time. As rationing is phased out in the ’50s, mealtime becomes a richer experience. In the 1960s, Elizabeth Chong taught
Carol about “modern” Asian cooking. When pineapple was all the rage, Olivia and Carol tried to make a pineapple-shaped duck-liver pâté, but Carol couldn’t find the pineapple mould. “So we brought out a fabulouslooking volcano,” she says. “It was covered in yellow-dyed mayonnaise.”
In 1969 Peter and Carol drank French champagne cocktails called moon shots that were invented to celebrate the lunar landing. They decorated the house and ate moon food to watch the moment Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
This, and watching the Whitlam dismissal, gave each family member a deeper appreciation for some of the historical events that shaped the 20th century. Olivia learned about the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, which hit before she was born, by baking charity cupcakes.
For Annabel, the way convenient, fast and frozen food became integral to our lives so quickly was stark and startling.
“The story that really blew me away was just the shift towards convenience food and convenience eating and an oversupply of food. The thing that the kids really noticed about the ’50s was that there was no food in the house. There’s none of this profusion and no supermarkets. Comparing it to now and seeing the progression was actually really confronting,” she says.
“It makes you question our need for all this stuff and supermarkets that will give you absolutely anything in and out of season. And the thought that we could arrive at this point after not very many decades – it is confronting.”
As for lessons learned from the experience, Carol wants to introduce one tech-free night a week, and Olivia is sold on roller skating. Everybody has taken something away from the experience, even if it is just a new appreciation for the luxuries of modern life. But they all agree that, when it comes to tripe and dripping, some things are best left in the past. AWW
Back in Time for Dinner airs on ABC1 and iView on Tuesdays from May 29.