Long boring retrospectives
Murrumbeena/Carnegie, 2003-2005 The move to Carnegie in 2003 gave me two local stations, because the house was almost equidistant between them. It was slightly closer to Murrumbeena, so I usually used that. But Carnegie had better access to shops, so that got used sometimes too. I’ve mentioned Murrumbeena already. Carnegie hasn’t changed much recently, but ... [More]
Hawthorn, 1993-95 When I finally moved out of home, it was to Hawthorn. Initially I was still working in Burwood East, and the commute was an easy tram ride, from the flat we rented which was midway between there and the city — which became useful once work moved into town. Cutting through the back ... [More]
Murrumbeena 1987-89 We moved into a flat just across the street from the Dandenong line. The noise isn’t noticeable after a week or two, apart from missing dialogue on the television when a freight train goes past. It was a short stroll (if one took the short-cut along the train line) to Murrumbeena station. By ... [More]
Balaclava, 1974-1982 We moved back to St Kilda, settling in a flat in Hotham Street where we lived for many years. Well, almost. We were in flat 7 on the ground floor, before moving upstairs to flat 11. Later on we moved around the corner onto Inkerman Street. During this time, Balaclava was our local ... [More]
Here begins a series of blog posts on every (suburban) railway station in Melbourne that’s ever been my usual. Of course it more-or-less tracks the places I’ve lived, and I’ve touched on some of this stuff in Commutes of my Youth. (Dates may not be exact.) St Kilda, 1970-71 When I was a baby, my ... [More]
One of the persistent myths is that in the “good old days”, before trains and trams had locked doors, nobody ever fell out. When the old VR ran the suburban network trains, and stations were manned and had barrier gates, trains had a lot of doors and it was never a problem. Nobody fell out ... [More]
I was telling the kids about the days when arcade games were ubiquitous. When we lived in Pine Avenue, Elwood in the early 80s, the local milkbar on Ormond Road had a Donkey Kong Junior machine, for instance. But a short bus ride away in St Kilda was video game heaven. For starters, Luna Park ... [More]
Right from the very beginning, the companions in Doctor Who were our (the viewers’) representatives on the voyage. For me growing up, the archetype for this character was Sarah Jane Smith, played by Elisabeth Sladen. She was there just as I got into the show. The innumerable repeats of 70s episodes in Australia during the ... [More]
M was telling me about an ad from the 70s telling people to save petrol. I had absolutely no recollection of it, but sure enough, Mr Youtube had it… What a cracker! I couldn’t figure out why they made the cartoon people nude, but a comment suggested it was to grab people’s attention. Perhaps I ... [More]
My recollection is this clip used to pop up on the ABC when they had five minutes to fill. Nowadays they’d probably just run a bunch of promos and adverts for the ABC Shop. The song is actually called “Love Is All”, from The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast. I can’t make it along, ... [More]
The other day I retired one of my oldest web pages, an FAQ on Melbourne public transport. It started life (I think around 1993, before the Web was around) as a Usenet FAQ for the misc.transport.urban-transit group. In 1994 it was posted (with an incomplete attempt to convert it to HTML) on Railpage — where ... [More]
John Lennon died thirty years ago yesterday. He was as old then as I am now. It would have been the following day, thirty years ago today, when the news broke in Australia. I remember getting home from school and switching the television onto channel 9, probably to watch Skippy or The Curiosity Show. A ... [More]