'Golden Days' not so golden

So, Vic Jefferies thinks the 1950s were "indeed the good days in Australia" (Peninsula News, 17 September).

In the 1950s, I was in my 20s and remember them very well.

At that time, Australia was an even more parochial, xenophobic, bigotted backwater than it is now, and the main characteristics of the population were smugness, self-regard and profound ignorance of the rest of the world.

Everyone was convinced (usually over a schooner in a men-only bar) that Australia was the best country in the world (most of them having never been to any other country), and women were treated as second-class human beings, often somewhat less kindly than family pets.

The notion that women might actually be capable of working at "real" jobs on an equal basis with men was regarded as laughable.

The world outside the British Empire was peopled by wogs, boongs, dagoes, niggers and chinks who were only slightly more human than the abos who were utterly worthless for anything.

Let us not speak of the Australian cuisine of the day (meat and three veg.) or of the pathetic level of cultural life which required anybody of any talent to decamp to the other side of the world as quickly as possible.

If these traits reflect the "good old-fashioned moral principles" that Mr Jeffries espouses, he can keep his moral principles to himself.

Of course, comparing the present day with a rose-coloured view of the past has been the stock-in-trade of moralising wowsers since the world began.

Those of us who actually lived through the Golden Days of the 1950s would no more welcome them back than we would the Dark Ages.

Email, 21 Sep 2012

Bruce Hyland, Daleys Point