Four things we no longer have that should have been missed.
1. Bookmaker’s tickets.
If you're silly enough to throw your money away on the thoroughbreds, you at least want a unique souvenir of the foolish investment. These days, you get a bog standard receipt on slimy paper in digital black and white. You may as well have bought a box of water crackers from a multinational supermarket. In them thar olden days, each bookie supplied a magnificently idiosyncratic and personalised masterpiece of design, colourful and bold, which he then scrawled your bet on. You felt rewarded for throwing away your hard-earned. It was more like a prescription for good fortune from a doctor of punting than the record of a transaction. The aesthetic result was a unique, bespoke masterpiece. Pity you threw it on the ground in disgust when your nag ran last.
2. Newspaper sellers
If you get your echo chamber updates from Facebook, you would be astonished to realise that a generation ago, not only were there newspapers produced at both ends of the day, the afternoon broadsheet Herald (not Sun-Herald) was spruiked by fearless children at busy intersections. At the corner of Epson and Smithfield Roads outside Flemington racecourse, for example, just after tossing away your gorgeous bookmaker’s ticket, you could have rolled down your car window (no electronics) and handed over a couple of coins to a nimble sprite lugging a hundred copies of the big, well-written afternoon edition, which would have printed the results of the first couple of races you had just witnessed. Child labour in dangerous confines: that’s the seventies all over. No helmets, no O. H. and S. No fatalities, either. Every last one of those traffic dodgers now owns a mansion.
3. The Long Lunch
The concept remains in our culture, the phrase persists in our language, but the fact is, the Long Lunch is unrespected in this grey, dull era; this generation is incapable of skiving off on a Friday afternoon as grandly and frequently as our forebears. Many professionals used to assume Fridays existed as a workday only until noon. The rest of the day was for socialising. So what if you had to go back to work Saturday to pay for the indulgence? It was worth it for the the irreplaceable camaraderie of rebellious carousing, the priceless hours of friendship-building and tall-tale telling. People used to tell jokes, remember that?
4. Six games on a Saturday
So the skills are better, the professionalism is stupendous. Blah blah blah. Footy was better at suburban home grounds, with all games occurring concurrently so mystery surrounded what was happening elsewhere. The replay only showed one game in any length, and three at all, so visiting a foe’s patch every second week was a true voyage of discovery. You had less idea what your opponent could do, and what oddities its stadium would throw at you. Modern footy in Melbourne, homogenised to two big stadia, is repetitive and too serious by half. Footy in the seventies was weird and wonderful. Scores from other grounds were semaphored by a letter system which left you constantly referring to your Footy Record. “A is beating B by six goals! Who is A again?” Mystery, novelty, discovery… and on the field the action was passionate and colourful, rough and vigorous, full of characters who liked to punt, buy a paper off an endangered schoolkid and indulge a long lunch without fear of being fined and suspended for bringing the game into disrepute.
Australian life is in disrepute, for not being as fun as it used to be.
1. Bookmaker’s tickets.
If you're silly enough to throw your money away on the thoroughbreds, you at least want a unique souvenir of the foolish investment. These days, you get a bog standard receipt on slimy paper in digital black and white. You may as well have bought a box of water crackers from a multinational supermarket. In them thar olden days, each bookie supplied a magnificently idiosyncratic and personalised masterpiece of design, colourful and bold, which he then scrawled your bet on. You felt rewarded for throwing away your hard-earned. It was more like a prescription for good fortune from a doctor of punting than the record of a transaction. The aesthetic result was a unique, bespoke masterpiece. Pity you threw it on the ground in disgust when your nag ran last.
2. Newspaper sellers
If you get your echo chamber updates from Facebook, you would be astonished to realise that a generation ago, not only were there newspapers produced at both ends of the day, the afternoon broadsheet Herald (not Sun-Herald) was spruiked by fearless children at busy intersections. At the corner of Epson and Smithfield Roads outside Flemington racecourse, for example, just after tossing away your gorgeous bookmaker’s ticket, you could have rolled down your car window (no electronics) and handed over a couple of coins to a nimble sprite lugging a hundred copies of the big, well-written afternoon edition, which would have printed the results of the first couple of races you had just witnessed. Child labour in dangerous confines: that’s the seventies all over. No helmets, no O. H. and S. No fatalities, either. Every last one of those traffic dodgers now owns a mansion.
3. The Long Lunch
The concept remains in our culture, the phrase persists in our language, but the fact is, the Long Lunch is unrespected in this grey, dull era; this generation is incapable of skiving off on a Friday afternoon as grandly and frequently as our forebears. Many professionals used to assume Fridays existed as a workday only until noon. The rest of the day was for socialising. So what if you had to go back to work Saturday to pay for the indulgence? It was worth it for the the irreplaceable camaraderie of rebellious carousing, the priceless hours of friendship-building and tall-tale telling. People used to tell jokes, remember that?
4. Six games on a Saturday
So the skills are better, the professionalism is stupendous. Blah blah blah. Footy was better at suburban home grounds, with all games occurring concurrently so mystery surrounded what was happening elsewhere. The replay only showed one game in any length, and three at all, so visiting a foe’s patch every second week was a true voyage of discovery. You had less idea what your opponent could do, and what oddities its stadium would throw at you. Modern footy in Melbourne, homogenised to two big stadia, is repetitive and too serious by half. Footy in the seventies was weird and wonderful. Scores from other grounds were semaphored by a letter system which left you constantly referring to your Footy Record. “A is beating B by six goals! Who is A again?” Mystery, novelty, discovery… and on the field the action was passionate and colourful, rough and vigorous, full of characters who liked to punt, buy a paper off an endangered schoolkid and indulge a long lunch without fear of being fined and suspended for bringing the game into disrepute.
Australian life is in disrepute, for not being as fun as it used to be.
