That's what I thought when I saw this old photo in the National Archives. I did a double take to make sure that it wasn't me that was striding down Alinga Street in Canberra Civic on my way to work at the ANZ Bank which used to be to the left of the then Bank of New South Wales on the left-hand corner across the street.
The setting was all mid-sixties: the no longer existing banks, the Bank of New South Wales, and farther up Petrie Street the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney (now merged with the National Bank) and English, Scottish & Australian Bank (which also merged with the ANZ); the ladies' dresses and handbags; the HOLDEN cars; and the plain white shirt and stovepipe pants of that chappie about to cross what is now Petrie Plaza.
That was 1965 (or 1966, or 1967, at the end of which I left Australia again), just after I had come off the boat from Germany, had jettisoned my woollen German business suit, and even adopted the perhaps now long forgotten habit of wearing white socks under my new Fletcher Jones black stovepipe pants. I was trying ever so hard to fit in!
Almost sixty years later, I've no trouble fitting in, except fitting into those plain white shirts and stovepipe pants, of which a few are still mouldering away in the attic. Even Vinnies wouldn't want them now!
