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Today, birthday parties for the recently deceased have died down, so to speak, but condensed milk is back with a vengeance (who knows what lurks in the C8 inbox? It’s a mystery every morning).
Andrew Macintosh of Cromer remembers, “During the war, when there was rationing, my mother used to give us three boys a tin of condensed milk each as Christmas presents. We punched two holes in them and sucked out the elixir – heaven. At 87, I still do it.”
A few years later, John Crowe of Cherrybrook, says: “At the end of the war, we were living on the Atherton Tableland, and in the school holidays I would visit timber cutters’ camps. Billy tea made over an open fire, sweetened with condensed milk. Bliss.” A lot of condensed milk over the years certainly doesn’t seem to have harmed either of these two gentlemen.
Alison Stewart of Waitara adds: “Sucking the contents of a can of condensed milk was a favourite of the boarders at my school in the 1950s. Especially after a free weekend, out of school. Purchases made offsite.”
Then Elizabeth Savage of Hughes in the ACT chimes in with a more ladylike version. “I have happy childhood memories of condensed milk. I, too, revelled in the occasional whole tin of condensed milk, although being a more refined girl child I ate mine with a teaspoon, not sucked through a hole. It was marvellously sweet, and because it was milk, it was therefore ‘good for you’. Virtue and satisfaction combined.” A very Column 8 conclusion, Elizabeth.
John Walter, all the way from Atlanta, Georgia, recalls that “years ago I came across displays of Carnation milk from Australia in shops in Lima, Peru. Peru has no dairy industry, so all milk products are imported.” So, not only C8 writers but also condensed milk are far-flung – who knew?
Going back for a moment to manual telephone exchanges, though not, thank heavens, another claim of being the last one, Craig Lilienthal of Wollstonecraft tells the tale of being “a young GP in West Wyalong during the 1970s and I got onto the exchange in Ungarie, needing to speak to the Ungarie doctor, urgently. Despite the fact that the lady on the Ungarie exchange was a patient of mine, it took me some time to extract from her just where their local doctor was, and with whom.”
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