“With so much clothing coming from China these days, it has made me reminisce about my childhood,” says Josephine Hill of Blackwall. “Every dress had a frill added to the bottom as we grew, dad’s shirts had their collars ‘turned’ when one side wore out, and I assumed sheets were bought with seams down the middle where they had been ‘turned’ so that the worn pieces were on the outside. I remember mum sitting at her Singer treadle long into the night, doing these extra chores. Maybe imports aren’t so bad after all?”
William Galton of Hurstville Grove remembers small children being called Globites (C8), “in that they are always wanting to be picked up”, but not everyone could afford one: “In 1951, for me to start at Armidale High School, my family could only afford a wooden bright-green school case,” recalls Ron Wheeler of Wagga Wagga. “It brought nary a skerrick of (expected) derision from what seemed like hundreds of Globite owners. It’s about to be handed on in the family, still with the timetable glued in the lid.”
“During World War II, my father made me a wooden school case, which was strapped to my bike rack as I rode to Hornsby Girls’ High School,” says Coral Button of North Epping. “Oh, the humiliation of my shake, rattle and roll progress, which could be heard well before my bike and I hove into sight.”
Bill Leigh of West Pennant Hills has some advice for the productivity seekers at the Reform Roundtable (C8) in Canberra: “If Australia’s productivity solutions are required to be cheap and fast, they won’t be good. If determined to be good and cheap, they won’t be fast, and, if demanded to be good and fast, they won’t come cheap.”
“As a senior citizen and still compos mentis, I was keen to find out a little more about this AI business (C8), so I borrowed a book on the subject from the library,” writes Chris Hope of Bobs Farm. “I found it so impenetrably confusing that I turned to ChatGPT for help. Now I suspect that the book itself was written by AI.”
“I believe I may have developed foresight,” reckons Stephanie Edwards of Leichhardt. “A couple of weeks ago, I made two online purchases. An umbrella as a birthday present for a relative and a pair of gum boots for myself. It hasn’t stopped raining since!”
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