Tiki and I purchased a Chef ‘Executive’ stove for two hundred and forty dollars. “Mum” and “Dad” on the other hand bought two Simpson ‘Minimatic’ washing machines before generously donating one to us.
He and I carried our heavy washing machine into the house, with my hands, which were gloved against the cold, almost losing their grip at one stage. The new stove followed, securely encased inside its crate of aluminium. Tiki soon discovered that we had been supplied with one that bears a door of black ‘glass’. Such a stove, she claimed, would have cost us more than fifty dollars extra!
We moved the old Parnall out to the backyard. Its element only worked on ‘high’ and the door to its oven had refused to stay closed. Its weight felt considerably greater than its new counterpart and the abruptness of its bottom edge made it feel as if it was going to sever my now gloveless fingers.
“Dad” and Tiki were down on their hands and knees scrubbing the tiles and lino with Ajax after I had scraped away the thick, oozy sludge that had lain beneath the old stove. He connected the new stove in half an hour, but not before “Mum” had burst into laughter when Tiki ungratefully remarked, “Is that all there is to it?”
I angrily retorted, “What do you mean… He’s bursting his gut down here!” And so he was! Faced with a somewhat lengthy struggle to successfully connect the wire that would earth the machine.
“Dad” left for work and the pair of us took “Mum” up to Miranda Fair, in the Chrysler ‘Galant’, at 11.00 a.m. At Nock and Kirby we bought eight handles for the doors of the kitchen cupboards, at a cost of eighty-five cents each. A Sabco toilet brush cost two dollars and ninety-five cents. “Mum” bought a hair dryer by Braun, which came with a styling wand in the shape of a stick. Its price of purchase was twenty-nine dollars.
Parramatta defeated Randwick by eighteen points to three on Channel Two’s live coverage of rugby union on this gloriously sunny afternoon. “Jeopardy” and “It’s Academic” appeared on Channel Seven in the hour from five o’clock. Channel Two’s edited replay of this afternoon’s game of rugby league followed from six. The Western Suburbs ‘Magpies’ defeated Canterbury-Bankstown by seventeen points to ten, thereby denting that side’s hopes of being one of the five teams that will then contest the duel for the premiership. Canterbury’s loss keeps Manly’s ambitions alive.
Fees at St. Andrew’s Cathedral School, in town, will be approximately six hundred dollars for a pupil in First Form. This, I have been reliably informed, is in spite of many of its classes having thirty-five students in them.