Remember way back when life was so much more simple than it is today. Now I am not sure how others of my generation grew up, but I do know that everything did seem so much more simple. I remember that we were taught to take responsibility for our own actions & our own mistakes. Oh, as kids we would try to blame others for the mistakes we made, but an adult would usually set us straight, usually with a swift kick in the butt or a swat around the ear.

I grew up in a big country town in Northern Queensland, Australia. we lived just outside town on a very large block of land. Our land backed onto crown land so I only had to walk out my back gate & I was on about 350,000 acres of bushland. For any kid, this is paradise. A lot of my friends also lived next to this crown land, so we would all meet there & keep ourselves amused for hours on end. This is in the days before Nintendo, Playstation & the Internet. We were totally carefree.

Remember way back when my mother would prepare the meals for the family. She had this big old wooden chopping board that she would use for everything. Can you imagine the things that would be said in this modern day if she try to do that. As I said, it was wooden {apparently this is a big no no}, and the fact that she would use it for pork, chicken, beef, fish, egg, salads, vegetables..... the list goes on. Mum would also make our school lunches on this same chopping board, preparing the sandwiches. Then she would wrap the sandwiches in wax paper then a simple brown paper bag. We put it in our school bag where it stayed until lunchtime. The town where I grew up was in the Australian tropics, the heat was unrelenting. The really strange thing about this is that I never recall any of us kids ever getting sick from an e.coli. All of my friends had their school lunch given to them the same way, I never did see anyone with a cooler for their lunch.

Remember way back when TV was black & white, and the radio was the wireless that was a piece of furniture in its own right. We had a massive unit that was a timber cabinet, speakers on each end with a radio & a record player. The record player had three speeds that needed to be adjusted for the different sizes that were played, we had the very popular 33's a lot of 45's and also some of our parents old 78's, and we played them all. The TV was only tuned on after about 6 at night, and we would need to wait for a few minutes for the set to warm up before we had even half a chance of seeing anything, then we would also need to adjust the faithful rabbit ears to help get a better picture. In the mid 70's Dad finally relented and did buy that new colour TV, at the same time he also had an outside antennae fitted to the house & wired up to the TV, this was really high tech now. That first Saturday night we had half the people in the street over to watch the first movie that we had ever seen in colour, "The Guns of Navarone". Lots of explosions, looked fantastic in colour.

Remember way back when all of us kids would play in the school grounds before school started, we had so much fun playing games that we would organise ourselves, and as the teachers arrived they would even join in. There were so many games, they all involved a lot of running and often a little bit of young bodies slamming into each other as well. We never really got hurt, sometimes we would have a few extra bruises, but these were just battle scars that wewr bragged about. Our school did not have a school nurse as such, but the principles secretary was where we all had to go as that was where the first aid kit was kept. She was a great lady, and could patch us up as good as new, she could even give us asprin or panadol. Imagine what would happen today if the school gave out drugs.

Remember way back when the school parents all got together to build the playground equipment. It was all welded together from bits of old water pipe left over from all the local building sites, not a single piece of plastic to be seen. The whole lot was on a dirt playground, with some gravel in the very high traffic areas, there was no recycled ground up car tyres on the ground to be seen, no soft landing areas {unless you count the bodies of other kids}. I am sure that we all learnt better coordination skills because of this. If we did not learn balance, it hurt! Occasionally someone would fall, the resulting cuts were treated either at school or we waited until we got home where our mother would put Mercurochrome on us after washing the area with antiseptic. These days we have a hospital trip & a small fortune in antibiotics, to say nothing of the possible legal action that the parents will try to inflict onto the school. We just dusted ourselves off & got on with life back then.

Sometimes we would wear shoes, but most of the time it was bare feet. We would wear shoes for sport. The shoes were usually the faithfull Dunlop Volley. We could not in our wildest dreams have imagined the pumped up cross trainers of today, and nor would we have been able to understand the use of these things. The shoes we had were very light {they had only a thin strip of rubber as the sole} and a canvas upper. Kids today are being diagnosed with shin splints caused from the impact of some exercise, we called the same thing sore legs & needed more exercise to get a bit fitter. We did not have many fat kids, and those that were had a genuine medical reason for that, and we all knew about it and did not tease or bully that person. We would walk or ride bikes to school every day no matter what the weather. It never really bothered us that sometimes we would get wet {put on cheap plastic raincoat} and it was fun to walk in the rain with all the water on the path or on the road.

Remember way back when respect was common. As kids we would never act up when at the home of a friend, because if we did we would get our ass spanked by the parents of our friends, then it would be spanked again when we got home by our own parents. We did as we were told. We would do some things that were seen as being a little naughty, but it never really bothered anyone. We would never vandalise, damage or hurt any person just because we were bored. We had been known to trespass on some private areas , but that was just a shortcut to get to a great fishing hole where we would spend hours trying to catch that big one we had heard about that got away from old Mr Kennedy years ago. The local copper knew everybody in the area & the names of the kids. He also knew our parents & could quite often be found having a quiet drink with the parents at the local pub when he was off duty. He had also been known to kick our butts when he caught us doing something wrong, in front of our friends when it hurt a lot more. He was a good man, and gave us a hard time when we went for our drivers licence. He taught us that it was a privilege & not a right to be allowed to drive. I know of many kids that Sgt Des kicked in the butt {including myself} I do not know of a single kid that ever try to charge him with police brutality.

Remember way back when every town had a drive in theater. My town had three of them, sadly none of them have survived to this day. As kids before we had cars we would sneak in through a hole in the back fence and watch free movies. We would also spend a small fortune {all relative of course when your allowence is only 25 cents} at the canteen during the intermission break. Every saturday was a double feature & before the movie you would have some {for about 15 minutes} short adds, the same adds were played at intermission. I have a suspicion that the owner knew that we did sneak in because the hole was in the fence for years, and there was a very well worn path through the bush leading to it. When we graduated to cars we would always go to our favourite Drive In, even if the film was only average. Why ?, because we had always gone there even as kids, and the owner was a bloody nice man, and had said hello to us for years. I'll not go into the memories of the relationships that were started & at times crushed in the cars while looking at the big screen. We all have our own memories of these events.

Remember way back when sometimes one of the local mothers would take a heap of us kids to a local sporting event. We would all load into a station wagon. There are 12 kids in a cricket team & we were all in the station wagon, plus a couple of adults. A few extra kids jammed in the front, 5 kids on the back seat, and the remainder in the back of the wagon. No airbags, safety belts or ABS brakes to be seen. Taking a weapon to school meant that you had a slingshot, not a semi automatic. a semi automatic was a type of transmission in a car. A race issue was who was the fastest runner, and Jimmy had different colour skin than some of us, but was a great shot with the slingshot & gave some of us tips on how to improve. Remember when the school would advise the parents about the best thing for the kids because they cared about the individual child & knew them by name. They would threaten that if we did not behave correctly and improve our grades we would be held back & made to repeat the year, and it was not an idle threat, they did actually carry it out & kids were made to repeat a grade. If we did happen to misbehave and get sent to the principles office it was bad, really bad. Although, it was no where near as bad as the retribution that would be carried out when we got home.

Remember way back when we were all kids and we were in fear of our lives. we were not in fear of our lives due to Drugs or gang warfare, or drive-by shootings, road rage shootings, depression shootings at schools. We were in fear of our lives from our family. Our parents and in some cases our grandparents were a bigger threat than any of the more modern threats could be. Some of us still have a little of that fear still within us.

I remember all of these. I feel sorry for my children because they will never know the fear of family as the biggest fear, to them, that fear is tiny compared with the others that are out there today. My children will never have the freedom that we had as kids. When some visiting relatives asked "Where are the kids" they were almost speechless when mother replied "I don't know, but they will be home when they are hungry" & we always were. I remember that fear, and I miss that fear.

But if you take too much notice of the media today, I wonder how we all survived.