Growing up on the cusp of car domination
Sydneysider: A personal journey
About 1955, when I was just seven, I started using public transport on my own. These days, such a thing would almost be evidence of child neglect, but half a century ago it was considered quite normal. People had no alternative but to trust their children to the system.
At that time my father, who had contracted a terrible case of tuberculosis in the UK during his war service, spent several months in Concord Repatriation Hospital. It was a repeat visit. He’d been shipped home in 1944 and, because of the damage to his spine, he’d ended up flat on his back in a full-torso plaster cast for about three years.
We had recently moved into a new house in Edgar Street Strathfield and mum visited dad in hospital almost every day. We were fortunate enough to own a car – a big forest green Ford V8 – but mum had never learned to drive. So the trip meant catching the 408 from the end of our street to the south side of Strathfield station, and then crossing to the north side to catch the 458 that ran along Concord Road to the hospital.
After we’d done this a few times, Mum wrote “458” on a piece of paper (in case I forgot), gave me the fare for the two buses and packed me off on my own. She followed on the next bus half an hour later. It all went off without any dramas and this trip became a routine.
Not long after, I had to make several visits to the family dentist whose surgery was on Concord Road, so I was despatched there on all on my own after school. Of course I hated going to the dentist (this was before dental anaesthetics and even the high-speed drill) so mum used to bribe me with enough change to buy a little toy farm animal from the hobby shop right across the road from the surgery.
When I was a bit older I travelled at least once, on my own, (and again preceding mum) to visit Aunt Dolly who ran the Pickwick Lending Library in Clovelly. This involved bus to Strathfield, train to Central then tram to Clovelly. I must have been eight, because the Clovelly tram was closed down in 1957.
The tram trip (route 15B) made a huge impression on me. We didn’t have trams out in Strathfield. To travel on this odd little train that ran through streets of ancient two and three storey houses (we hardly did two-storey either in Strathfield!) sparked a sense of fascination. Who lived, I wondered, in these strange houses with their wonderful iron lacework balconies? And then, at Anzac Parade, the tram shifted from the road and ran on its own track, seemingly through grassy fields. Further east, it diverged from the streets again to pass along its own mysterious rights-of-way.
Looking back, we can see that in 1955 Sydney was on the cusp of a relentless road to automobile domination. In that year the average Australian only travelled about 3000 kilometres by motorised road transport. But the post-war explosion in car ownership had taken off and in the decade from 1950 to 1960 registrations increased by 131 per cent. Today, the tide of history is flowing in the opposite direction. Per capita vehicle kilometres traveled reached a historic peak – just short of 11,000 kilometres annually – in 2004 when petrol hit 90 cents a litre. They’ve declined ever since, and are now back to the levels of the early 1990s. In 1955, in NSW, there were around 300,000 registered cars for 3.5 million people, which is one for every eight and a half people. Now it’s almost one for two, although the number of people per car is starting to rise.
Around 1958 a few of my friends got bikes and I asked if I could have one too, but my parents refused point-blank. Public transport was one thing, but bikes – which they’d both grown up with – were now far too dangerous for kids. Their attitude reflected a grim reality. At the Babcock and Wilcox factory, where my father started work as a draughtsman in 1952, there were racks for three or four hundred bicycles, but by the mid fifties they were rapidly emptying. No doubt there had been many tragic accidents and what had been a much more common mode of conveyance than the private car was disappearing from the streets.
