“Poor old Mrs Birrell of the South Coast, having to eat lobster so often (C8),” sympathises Dave Williams of Port Macquarie. “When I was just married, in 1967, and living in Perth, the rocks just off the beaches on the north side were teeming with crayfish and, being a spearfisherman, I found them easy to catch. My wife and I usually had two tails each for lunch every Sunday, and the dog had one, too, all cooked in one of the many old laundry coppers left on the beaches for that very purpose.”
“My son and his friends regularly go lobster diving off Scarborough/Wombarra Beach and surrounds and still bring home some magnificent catches,” claims Janice Creenaune of Austinmer. “Nowadays though, they need licences, regulation equipment and catches are limited. But the thrill of the catch and the taste remain the same I can assure you. Even mums sometimes are given one or two.”
“The tower clock at Hornsby is 15 minutes out,” notes Betty Graham of Waitara. “Does this explain why I keep missing my train?”
Doug McLaughlin of Bonnet Bay remembers that some delivery horses (C8) had to operate in adverse conditions: “Mark Berg’s on the trot memories took me back to 1942 when the Japanese subs were blasting missiles over the eastern suburbs. In Bellevue Hill, facing the east, we spent the entire night in the dugout beneath the house. It was nerve racking. The following morning, the milk and bread vendors had to placate their horses following all the sirens and explosions which were more than upsetting. My kindergarten in Bondi North also had the day off for our nerves to settle. My nightmares took some weeks to dissipate.”
“Wildlife experts in Queensland have reported on a frog which, unusually, breathes through its cloaca,” notes Lin Sinton of Killarney Heights. “Surely, that’s not so rare? We have politicians who talk through theirs all the time.”
Replies to Ellen Kassel regarding the existence of knife sharpeners in Australia (C8) were pointed. And among them was this one from Graham Cook of Bombala: “In the early 1950s in Geelong, Victoria, the bread and the milk certainly arrived in a horse-drawn cart and the sharpener man arrived pushing a modified wheelbarrow. The memory is faint, but I believe a grinding wheel was suspended above a body of water in the barrow and that the customer powered the wheel.”
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