I was sorting through an old steamer trunk that’s travelled with me for the last thirty years. The musty smell when I lifted the lid was almost enough to knock me over, but with a reunion with my best friends from school coming up in January, I felt ready for a stumble down memory lane.

Apart from other stuff, the trunk contains a few old magazines that I can never bring myself to throw out, despite the number of times I’ve approached it with just that aim in mind.

The July 1946 edition of The Geographical Magazine – in glorious monochrome – carries advertisements for everything from nerve tonic and medicinal lozenges, to shipping lines with routes to the post-war bolt holes of South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

It’s clear from the magazine that the world was only just recovering from a severe battering. An ad for the Army Benevolent Fund urges readers to support those ‘who are up against very real difficulties as a result of war service, yet are outside the scope of Government relief’. 

After all that war-torn grief, a population explosion was inevitable. 

The ‘baby boom’ was a marketer’s dream. Right from the get-go we were on a winning streak, being the most numerous of any generation ever born. 

Once we hit our teen years, our revolt against the social values of our parents meant big business for retailers, magazine editors, photographers, fashion houses, film studios, the recording industry and publishers.

When young women decided that underwear was a male sexist construct, that forced them to conform to a stereotypical image, the fashion industry marketed designs to appeal to the sexually liberated young woman.

According to my 1971 edition of POL magazine, hot pants, mini-skirts and diaphanous dresses were in vogue. In Australia, changes in fashion arrived later than in London but, heck, in those days we were only just cutting ourselves free from the ties of Mother England and the interminable years of Robert Menzies, number one groupie to HRH. We were just beginning to get the hang of that whole revolt-into-style thing.

In 1971 Life magazine ran an article  by Albert Goldman entitled ‘What’s deader than discotheques?’ It was about the change in dance styles from the 1960s to the 1970s.

He named some of the dances that were popular in discos in the 1960s: the Twist, the pachanga, the pony, the Bristol stomp, the mashed potato, the hully gully, the popeye, the limbo, the dog, the waddle, the jerk, the frug, the fly, the bugaloo, the Freddie, the Watusi, the skate… Ah, the skate – memories of a darkened, strobe-lit dance floor, sliding around with a boy to Credence’s ‘Proud Mary’.

When women decided to attempt to live without wearing make-up, Revlon produced ‘The first totally translucent finish-for-the-face…that looks and feels (and moves)… like spontaneous skin.’

The ad ran in the February 1968 edition of Nova, the same issue that carried a photo of heavily made-up models, chained to the fence near London’s Houses of Parliament. The story headline was ‘50 Years after the vote: only the chains have changed’.

Who’d have thought it possible, back in 1968, that forty years later women still wouldn’t earn as much money as men? 

Getting back to the ad, the Revlon Demi-Makeup was described thus ‘…it slips on with a new sort of sleek, skimmy ease. You can work with it, play with it, blend it endlessly.’

Let’s – ahem – face it, any self-respecting, sexually liberated female had little else to do in 1968 except to endlessly blend her make-up. ’Skimmy ease’? The copywriter had to be on something.

In the same issue of Nova, Yardley had the nerve to run an ad for face powder showing young women on the deck of a submarine with the headline ‘Girls are coming back… POWdered’. 

One can only assume that the cosmetics company was attempting to employ the same tactics which, three decades later, a record company would use to launch the Spice Girls into the tabloidosphere with Grrrl power.

In 1970 our screen idols were reclusive beasts who lived solitary lives. Robert Redford was reported to be a  particularly camera-shy creature, although he did manage to succumb to an eight-page feature, with moody photographs, at his remote Utah ranch for Life magazine.

In 1969 Redford starred with Paul Newman in ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid‘. The magazine feature probably did the film, and Redford’s career, no end of good. 

Film stars in those days were pretty much left to their own devices. The word ‘celebrity’, instead of ‘film star’, had yet to emerge as common currency.

The word ‘paparazzi‘ was little known beyond Fellini aficionados… and a certain film star who thumbed her nose at those who protested against humans wearing animal pelts. Unlike the endangered animals whose skins she wore, Sophia Loren was considered fair game. 

In 1970 home interior design didn’t appear so different to contemporary design. Perhaps in those days it was a little more adventurous in the use of colour and fabric. 

With its fluid curving lines, this house looks as if it could be a straw-bale construction.

In 1970 it was described as ‘a monument to modern-day spray-can culture… made of sprayed-on polyurethane foam’.   

I guess the main change between then and now is the technological revolution. While they’ve made communication easier, the computer and mobile phone have increased the speed at which we live and pushed leisure time into an ever diminishing corner. Now we set aside special ‘quality time’ for loved ones, instead of all sitting down together for meals. 

We talk of being ‘time poor’ when once we had so much time ahead of us. The reality is that at this stage of our lives, baby-boomers have more time behind than in front of us.

It’s good to remember the days when we were busy having the time of our lives.

The Marlboro Man, whose craggy visage once graced the back cover of Life, ran out of time a few years ago. He’s gone to Marlboro Country for good.