Exactly! Not a single tattoo in sight! No metal studs through ears, eyebrows or nose! No spiked or multi-coloured hair! No jeans either! Men wore white shirts and ties, and their trousers had a crease in them. And women were nice to look at in lovely dresses, with just a hint of a make-up.
Just mentioning this would brand me as an incorrigible misogynistic bigot now, but that was the world I lived in when I arrived in Canberra in 1965 to take my first tentative steps into a commercial career as bank officer with the ANZ Bank just across the street from David Jones' (who back then still had an apostrophe at the end of their name which is something else we still possessed in those days: proper punctuation).
You could tell a woman's age by the height of her hemline and a man's by the vent in the back of his jacket: the middle-aged man had a vent down the middle and anyone younger a trendy one on either side. I was a "middle-aged" nineteen-year-old in my German suit with just one vent. And the black and narrow tie was a direct copy of the Latter-day Saints' dresscode. The only stylish accessory was the pocket square: coloured and pointy for the young, and white and square for the not-so-young.
I would've taken these photos myself had I owned a camera back in those impecunious early days but I didn't; instead, I found them on the website of the National Archives of Australia - and I'm so glad I did!
