Change for the better: Part I

 

COVID has seen a radical change in the way we work, probably the greatest change since the introduction of the eight-hour working day. Almost everyone I have spoken to or heard from now intends to spend most of the week working from home with just a day or so physically present at the workplace. Inevitably this will assist young parents manage their households with less strain; a short trip to the shops for example can be fitted in to the working day because the time can be made up before or after normal working hours. That’s the way it now works in our household. So, working from home is A Great Thing!

Civilisation has evolved to be radically different from the way it was a century or so ago. We have gone from the penny-farthing bicycle to the lunar landing module, from rampant tuberculosis to virtually none (at least in the west), smallpox has been eradicated and so has polio (again in the west), open heart surgery has become commonplace, space tourism has been introduced at least for the very rich, and an American President has communicated with his citizens largely through Twitter which didn’t exist five minutes ago. Indeed five minutes ago there were none of the communication devices used today; no Facebook, no Instagram, no Spotify, no all the other things which I don’t use but most people do.

Computers are another major change to our civilisation. I’m old enough to remember the ‘80s when we did our work on typewriters and how the newspaper of which I was the editor brought in computers both for writing and for printing. This wasn’t all that long ago. In 1981 I worked completely on a typewriter to prepare a report for the then Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (now the Powerhouse) on the historical archaeology project I was engaged in. Actually, there was in fact one computer in Sydney when I was growing up; it was called SILLIAC, lived at Sydney University and weighed five tons

I also remember the introduction of electronic banking and watching fascinated as other people extracted their money from a hole in the bank wall. What a huge change that was. This banking revolution meant I would no longer have to spend half my lunch hour waiting in a queue at the bank to cash my salary cheque. And then there was EFTPOS, an acronym for Electronic Funds Transfer at Point of Sale. We have moved now to a virtually cashless society, unthinkable just a few years ago.

I grew up with pounds, shillings and pence, a peculiar British-based currency of great and boring complexity where there were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound. There was also a sixpence and a threepence, pronounced I recall as “thruppence” or “throopence”. Until the early ‘70s we also had temperature in Fahrenheit, weight in stones, pounds and ounces (16 ounces to a pound, 14 pounds to a stone), height in feet and inches (12 inches to a foot) and distance in feet, yards and miles (3 feet to a yard, 1760 yards to a mile). And to manage all of this complexity we had no calculators; we just had to do the sums. In the olden days there was no harbour tunnel or cross city tunnel. And to cross the bridge by car one paid threepence for each adult, one penny for children and sixpence for the car.

In my childhood we celebrated Empire Day which became Commonwealth Day and then just Cracker Night. For this event each family purchased fireworks and set them up at home: Catherine Wheels pinned to trees, rockets to the back fence and sparklers for the kiddies to wave around (the good ones) or bungers to set off (the naughty ones). Once Dad (and it was always Dad with possible assistance from older, male children) had everything prepared, he would light them all and come inside to join the rest of the family to watch the display. Our nanny state of today couldn’t possibly let this continue as each year there were one or two nasty accidents. The nanny state has also seen barriers go up around swimming  pools (an altogether good thing) and the abolition of small x-ray machines in shops selling children’s shoes; they were used to check the fit of the shoes until it was discovered that x-rays could be harmful.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta: Originally the Africans had the land and the English had the Bible. Then the missionaries came to Africa and got the Africans to close their eyes and fold their hands and pray. And when they opened their eyes , the English had the land and the Africans had the Bible.