Who can relate to this?

[Dengue]

WE WAS BRUNG UP PROPER!!"And we never had a whole Mars bar until 1993"!!!

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALLTHOSE WHO WERE BORN IN THE 1930's 1940's, 50's, 60's and early 70's !

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos.
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes or cervical cancer.

Then after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets or shoes, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

Take away food was limited to fish and chips, no pizza shops, McDonald's , KFC, Subway or Nandos.

Even though all the shops closed at 6.00pm and didn't open on the weekends, somehow we didn't starve to death!

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

We could collect old drink bottles and cash them in at the corner store and buy Toffees, Gobstoppers, Bubble Gum and some bangers to blow up frogs with.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soft drinks with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because......

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.


We would spend hours building our go-carts out of old prams and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. We built tree houses and dens and played in river beds with matchbox cars.


We did not have Playstations, Nintendo Wii , X-boxes, no video games at all, no 999 channels on SKY, no video/dvd films, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!


We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no Lawsuits from these accidents.


Only girls had pierced ears!


We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.


You could only buy Easter Eggs and Hot Cross Buns at Easter time...


We were given air guns and catapults for our 10th birthdays,


We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!

Mum didn't have to go to work to help dad make ends meet!


RUGBY and CRICKET had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!! Getting into the team was based on MERIT

Our teachers used to hit us with canes and gym shoes and bully's always ruled the playground at school.


The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of.
They actually sided with the law!

Our parents didn't invent stupid names for their kids like 'Kiora' and 'Blade' and 'Ridge' and 'Vanilla'


We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL !



If YOU are one of them!
CONGRATULATIONS!


You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good.


And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were.

I can relate to most of this, esp the billy carts with no brakes down the steep concrete footpath. And getting the ball bearings for wheels from the local garage workshop

They forgot to mention the bows and arrows.


PS -The big type is because our eyes are not too good at our age anymore

[gidgee 1]

yeah. Ditto to all that
cheers
gidgee1

[The Bleeder]

Yeah....been there done all of that and I'm probably better off for it. (I think)

Billycarts were the best..lots of skin left behind on the road. (as you said NO BRAKES)

[artme]

Yep! No bloody sissies in those days!

No damaged psychies from a clip over the ear when you bloody well deserved it!

I have been told the story of how, as a bad tempered little bugger, I got down on all fours and tried to bite my mother's ankle. ( A true ankle biter ). Mum removed a loose paling from the nearby fence and whacked me with it. All of this in the main street!!

Two things resulted from this:

1. I never tried that again.
2. I have no ill feelings towards my mother and I'm not psychotic becayse of it.

[opelblues]

i swung from a rope tired to a branch in a gum tree in to the creek, and didn't sue if the rope broke

[jimbur]

It's a sobering thought but if our parents did such a good job we must be to blame for the next generation.
Cheers,
Jim

[3RU]

Yep all familliar.

Anyone drill a spud gun to .22 blow it to bits and still able to tell the story?

Yep I learned from that one and I still feel he clip under the ear.

Dave

[AUSSIE]

I collected papers and bottles to sell.I then went and bought heaps of crackers and had a ball with them.I wasn't breaking the law and I didn't hurt myself or anyone else

[Waldo]

And we caught yabbies and tortoises in the creeks before they concreted them 'cause they could be dangerous for kids;
we lined up empties on a board across the creek and fired our air rifles at them;
if we didn't have a bike we'd walk for kms, if our mate had two bikes we ride for kms;
cars did 60km in our streets and we never got hit;
we could fish without paying a licence;
we launched our BMX's off rocket jumps before council decided that an old lady who owned acres of land, which we called BillGees, and who let the neighbourhood kids make km's of winding tracks with jumps everywhere.


We had fun, we were kids.

[underused]

I'm only 34 but can relate to a lot of that
I'd add swimming in the rivers in the summer and if we found some rope, making a rope swing from a tree...fond memories

[cultana]

I deny it all, because if I do agree that that was fact I must be getting old .

But Wife keeps telling me to "grow up" so something is a miss here.

[Woody1]

Yep I can relate to all that. I remember walking through our town early Sunday mornings to go to my mates place with 12 gauge over my shoulder and a belt full of cartridges to go shooting fox's and rabbits. We would walk all day and think nothing of it.
Used to love catching yabbies in the dam
I wanted a cricket bat once Mum said I would have to get a job as she did not have the money so I got a job cleaning dishes in a butcher shop after school. Same went for when I wanted a tennis racket and welder I got a paper round before I went to school.
Used to knock off my old mans 28inch fixed wheeler with no brakes and go for a ride sometimes. Now that used to be an interesting ride
My how times have changed

[Pops]

Yep, can relate to all of that too. Oh for the simpler days.

Pocket money then was something you had to work for, remember riding my bike for miles on saturdays to chop wood for pensioners for a shilling a go. Mind you some of the grannies could weild an axe better than I could, and I was quite handy with an axe.

[dakotax3]

Brung Up? HELL NO! We were kicked and told to GET UP!

For a treat us kids could buy 10 cents worth of chips in newspaper and another 10 cents of mixed lollies and they would last for ages. Sawdust on the butcher shop floor, meat in more newspaper and string hanging from the ceiling. We recycled our own newspaper without the need for huge plastic recycling bins to be picked up by huge dinosaur burning plastic bin collecting trucks to be taken to huge recycling plants. Yep, we've come a long way.

Used to buy biscuits and nails and screws alike in bulk by taking as many or as few as you liked out of bins often in the same shop. Pay by weight and no packaging to recycle. Recycle, what the hell is that? We were already right into recycling in the fullest sense (look under your lino floors) and didn't give it trendy names with expensive and inefficient side-industries. Read: rort.

Billy carts rolled on gravel roads and gravel rash all down one side for weeks; no complaining, it was normal for us. Even made a sail for our billy carts one day, that one was a bit on the edge I must say.

We worked on and used chainsaws, laboured by the side of the old swingsaw fer dad and driving, on the road, since we could fully depress the clutch. Swingsaw. Swingsaw. Yer dunno what a swingsaw is? Ye Godz n little fishes you poor little darlings.

My father bought another ute for me to use before school to do er, ahh... the rounds. I was about 15/16. By then I was long versed in engine repair, shoe-ting, painting houses and all sorts. My father bought some reloading gear and I would come home from school and go straight to an old door laid out as a bench in the lean-to shed and reload dad's empty cases. No need for me to mention all of the bits that make everything go bang; all laid out on the table within reach right beside the chainsaw and petrol tin and dad's tobacco and matches, none of that mattered; we were as safe as houses. NOTHING EVER HAPPENED. EVER. Old oil tins with their sides cut out full of petrol soaking various parts for cleaning and yet NOTHING EVER HAPPENED. EVER. All of this about the time when Abba first brought out their hit Waterloo and I used to listen to it on grandmas old staticky radio that you had to jiggle the volume knob to make it clearer. Bit like the old b&w tellys where you had to do the same thing with the channel selector to make it clearer.

And you know you're in a backwater lifestyle when you get the raw ingredients for the afore-mentioned reloading for your birthday... from your mother.

[Terry B]

I agree with most of it except the riding in cars without seatbelts etc. Something did happen. Lots of people died.
See here
http://www.rta.nsw.gov.au/roadsafety...08_to_2009.pdf
About 6 fatalaties/10000 population over the last 10 years compared to about 25/10000 in the 60's and 70's. There are other factors as well including RBT but all have reduced the death toll.