I absolutely enjoyed watching "The Efficiency Expert", set in the Australia of the 1960s, the one I fell in love with when I arrived here in 1965. It all came back in a sudden rush: the way people dressed and spoke back then; the way people worked (or not!); and all those walnut-coloured furnishings that surrounded us.
But what really got my attention was the noticeboard on the wall that had diagonally-placed straps across to hold in place whatever was on it.
One such now old-fashioned noticeboard was in the entrance hall of Barton House (I nearly wrote 'foyer' but it wasn't that kind of place). The manager would place all incoming letters on that board, roughly in alphabetical order, with the A's in the top left-hand corner and the Z's at the bottom right, and each evening on coming "home" from work, we would check the noticeboard for mail before heading to our rooms.
I sometimes used the Bank's aerogrammes to write to family and friends
(yes, that's how I used to write my capital-A's; I was a lot squarer then)
For some of us, including 'yours truly', "mail" was often nothing more than a plain-looking envelope containing a note from the manager that we had (once again!) fallen behind paying our boarding-house fees.
I never forget the day a fat envelope was waiting for me which, like an hour-glass, leaked a slow trickle of sand from a damaged corner. I had just returned to Australia after six months in the Namib Desert in South-West Africa, and my former colleagues had sent me a "souvenir" from "Sandhausen"; "in case you're missing all that sand", they'd written.
That's how it was in those days: there were no postal secrets and yet an unspoken "untouchability" of one's mail, even if it stayed on the board for days and weeks on end, even months if the recipient was on holiday. I knew of boarders who had cash money sent to them through the mail!
It's unthinkable in today's Australia, just as unthinkable as those same boarding-houses which have all disappeared. As for the slowly-leaking envelope, it would today be confiscated by Customs on suspicion of containing a prohibited substance. How I long for those innocent 60s!
