It’s A Long Way To The Shop – If You Want A Sausge Roll

This happens to me often. I hear a song and it takes me back to another time. Particularly with songs from the from when I was much younger. This song never fails to take me back to the late 70s. The cars, the people’s clothing and hairstyles remind me of when I was a teenager.

I was eighteen in 1975 when this song was released and Hubby and I had just met that year. Over the next couple of years we made a couple of visits to Melbourne where the video was made and Swanston Street looked just the way it does here. I think we have walked from one end of Swanston Street to the other so the route is very familiar to me. On our first couple of visits we stayed at a hotel called “The Victoria” which was on nearby Little Collins Street. We often used to go to a cafe there called the ” Chat and Chew” for breakfast or dinner. We liked it because the meals there were cheap and good and because they had juke box selectors on every table, something we hadn’t seen before. We put a lot of coins into those machines :).
I can still remember riding on the old trams, we’d catch a tram in Swanston Street to go to St Kilda. Trams still had conductors then, not ticket machines. We did a lot of riding around on trams and electric trains visiting places like Frankston, Brighton, St Kilda, there was a train service then and Belgrave to ride on “Puffing Billy” of course. We loved Flinders Street Station on the corner of Swanston and Flinders Streets and even spent some time exploring Princes Bridge Station which was just across the road on the opposite corner. I can’t remember if we visited Young and Jackson’s , the famous old pub opposite the station. We probably did but I remember it better from more recent visits.

Now of course Swanston Street is a very different place. The trams are still there but the cars are gone. The “Chat and Chew” is long gone, its owners probably retired or forced out by higher rents. The (to me) hideous Federation Square dominates the Flinders Street end of the road. But when I hear AC/DC I can forget that and I’m a young woman visiting Melbourne for the first time again. We both still love seeing the video on TV and will usually stop what we are doing to watch it if it comes on. I still think it’s a great song too and I love the bagpipes, bagpipes in a rock song, what a great idea!

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