I was born in 1970, so I’m a little late for this, but I do remember the 70s pretty well, and the early 80s weren’t a heck of a lot different (the obvious 70s fashions had gone, but many attitudes and social issues were the same).
We used to leave home at 7:30am to go to school. There was a 3/4 mile walk through quiet wooded roads, followed by a fifteen minute bus journey which would deposit us at school rather early (it didn’t start until 9am). All this was unsupervised (aside from the bus driver), and I was going to school this way at five years of age, with my seven year old sister. That seemed normal, though these days, I have to take my five year old by the hand right into the school grounds, and wait until the teacher files them into the building, before I leave. The police came and spoke to the kids in the classroom (they’d have a turn wearing his hat etc) once year. When we were very small, the talks were about “Stranger Danger”, so the concern about perverts must have been there, but it was in its very early stages. Later, the cops spoke to us about drugs and drink driving, etc.
Living near the beach, the surf culture was absolutely huge.
When The Village People came on the scene, music commentators declared the 70s dead, and said this would be the sound of the 80s! hehe When Cliff Richard did Wired for Sound, the idea that you could listen to a casette on the move totally blew my mind.
I’m not sure whether the economy in the US was better, or whether it’s just cheaper to buy a car there, but I’m surprisedat the number of posts saying things like, “Why, some families only had one car!” I lived in a very socio-economically diverse area. Folks in mansions, and others on walfare. Yet, the one car family was the norm, with the second biggest group probably zero car families. Of a High School with 1100 students, possibly a couple of hundred of which would have been old enough to drive, about five or six brought cars to school.
We were usually a little behind the US in fashion, but equal or ahead in adoption of new technology (I think this is still the case). We’d seen car phones in the movies (though my granddad called my mum from some sort of radio phone in a car for her 21st birthday in 1956!), but mobiles as we know them were some time off. Yuppies started appearing with clunky shoulder-slung handsets in the early 80s. Push button phones appeared in the late 70s. We were late to get colour TV, because the Australian Govt decided to wait to decide which format to use. We got PAL colour in 1974. Visiting relatives from Canada commented on how clear Aussie TV was. Our family had B&W up until the early 80s. TV news readers would glance down at notes. They had autocues then, but didn’t seem to use them much. Weathermen on TV would manually pull sliding maps across the set. I remember the test pattern (even in the daytime sometimes). Often there’d be a clock with a second hand sweeping up to the hour, just before a programme started. Stations would go off the air around midnight, and they’d play the national anthem. FM radio was around in the 70s, but for some reason only seemed to play classical music. Rock was on AM. VCRs and microwaves were prohibitively expensive. Computers were around, but they were “too hard”. Wealthy friends had Pong and other plug-in units.
Drink driving was common. When the police introduced random breath testing in 1983, 6% of drivers they pulled over on a Friday or Saturday night would be over the legal limit. Now, that figure is around 1%. The death toll on the roads was horrific. People were drunk, the cars were powerful and had no safety mechanisms apart from seat belts, there were fewer freeways and more winding two lane blacktop.
Our education system also went through the experimental phase, and everything was group hug happy clap hands all winners no losers, which resulted in my education having vast holes in it which I nad to remedy by myself later. For example, I was not taught the multiplication tables. Grammar tuition was marginal at best. Instead of the old system of children being placed in different classes, depending on ability (2A, 2B, 2C for year 2, etc), they introduced “parallel classes” (oh yes, and one “special” class for the dummies (no stigma in that!).
Malls have been around in Australia since the early 60s, but there were fewer of them. Those that were there tended to be much smaller than today’s malls (maybe 50 stores in them) in the centre of towns, with all the other shops. The huge freestanding malls got more of a foothold in the 80s, and were responsible for turning many shopping strips I rememver as being lively in the 70s, into little more than ghost towns. Our town had a main street only, and the beach. That’s where we spent out time. It was a quiet place with fishing boats, and a few tourists here and there. Now it’s tourist hell, very busy, over-developed, snooty, and expensive.
We had McDonalds, but that was eight miles away, and it was the only one for fifty miles in either direction. It had a theme like they used to tend to have. This one was bicycles. Macca’s don’t seem to do that anymore. The food was just as awful then as now.
In short, lots of time riding bicycles (very cool dragsters hehe), a bit of TV, school, cricket, and generally being outside most of the time.
