When I was young, way back in the 1960s, having your photo on a newspaper’s social pages was a big deal, and and probably still is, especially if you live in a major city. Today, of course, everyone with a smart phone is a photographer with a choice of social media platforms on which to post pics and footage.
The social pages of our local newspaper The Launceston Examiner (founded 1842) carried photos of people in the surrounding community as they celebrating weddings, significant birthdays and major anniversaries, as they probably still do. However, rather than being a cross section of the community, those photos tended to be of people with social, political and professional professional prominence, and anyone with pots of money, most of whom were the descendents of the earliest free settlers in the penal colony, founded in 1803. Other early settlers who eventually did well financially included some former convicts; and after the 1988 Bicentenary of European settlement, a convict or two in the family tree was no longer the barrier to upward social mobility as it had been in my youth.
Apart from early settlers and wool growers, larger orchardists and early industrialists, there was another group of people who, although no longer wealthy, had far reaching historical connections to the earliest colonial days, giving them some kind of socially agreed but unwritten cachet that saw them frequently included on ‘the best’ party lists, and their photos were taken every now and then as if to refresh that unspoken validation. In the social setting within that former colony, money and position spoke quite loudly, and probably still do, as they do here in Uruguay. I’ve often declared that growing up in Tasmania was good training for Uruguay. My father was an optometrist and Mum did lots of community good works, so they were well enough known in the city for her to be able to phone the social editor to ask for a photographer and reporter to turn up and take a pic of me and a couple of guests at the party. They would have turned up very early in the evening, taken the photo and jotted down our names before heading off to the next event they had to ‘cover’.
I don’t remember any particular feature about that evening, but it would have been really lovely even if much like other such 21st birthday parties we attended in those years. There would have been a band playing popular dance music in a mixture of ‘traditional’ ballrooom dances like the waltz and fox trot, mixed with the twist and other dances associated with whoever was on the hit prades, so we danced with great enthusiasm to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Procul Harem, and, well… you had to be there.
Besides Coke and other soft drinks, a big punch bowl (fruit juice, a good hit of white or red wine and floating fresh fruit with mint leaves) plus beer and wine would have been the main drinks. The city’s most prominent caterer was Mr. Keetley, who always did a fabulous job. Mum and her friends hired him for all such events, so I’m sure his team were there that night. If the evening began around 8pm, then supper was usually served around 11pm, followed by a bit more dancing until perhaps midnight or 12.30. Supper would have included party pies and sausage rolls, probably little red cocktail sausages on toothpicks, and probably asparagus rolls (canned stems rolled up in finely sliced bread) Desserts would almost have certainly included pavlova cakes, probably trifle, and maybe fruit salad.
When Anna sent me this photo a couple of weeks ago, because we haven’t lived in Launceston since our wedding in 1969, I just couldn’t remember that venue, Victoria League House (as per the above photo’s caption) However, sister Rosemary, the family’s historian, found this set of photos online in what is apparently a large data set about some of the most beautiful well preserved fairly grand houses (in the architectural style known as ‘Federation’) built in Australian cities and towns around the time of Federation, 1901. Launceston has a lot of them – as Tasmania was in the midst of a mining boom at the time. Take a minute to check out this one – Victoria League House It is just one of many houses that were built to last in that era. With high ceilinged, large rooms and large varandahs that could be enclosed, by our time many had been converted to event centres, professional offices, additions to schools and even hosptials, like St. Luke’s Hospital just in the next block down that street. Because of our beloved headmistress’s rivettingly boring teaching style, I had opted out of history at the earliest chance, thus augmenting my ignorance, so as a know-it-all teen, I saw these Federation and the Queen Anne style that followed, as just old fashioned and thought little more about them. I myself much preferred the modern, 60s-style flat or skillion roof numbers with floor to ceiling picture windows, angular wrought iron balustrades, hip height brick fences with similar height front gates that matched the railing on the front verandah. And even though I still prefer plain and uncluttered, today I really love those Federation buildings for their elegant style, quality of construction, but most of all for their owners’ expression of confidence in the young country’s future.