A brain storm of kiwi student life in the early 1970s

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LinkedIn brought me a re-connection with a university flatmate from 1973-1975. He lamented the absence of mementos from the period, due to his ex girlfriend taking them with her after they split.

I brainstormed this list of memes reflecting life of a kiwi student in the early 1970s at Massey University.

The thon
Multinational monopoly
The Wynd

Fresh sunday bread and honey

Telebetting

Great feasts…. When the TAB (horse betting) payoff to Ronald and Jones paid out bigtime.
Battered lambs brains … with battered parsnips and carrots.

The Goon show
… Tough? You think that’s tough! I remember when…. 
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
Stanley Kubrick movies
2001 A Space Odyssey
A Clockwork Orange
Barry Lyndon
Let it be
The Massey drama society Shakespeare productions
Gravity’s Rainbow
Lord of the Rings
Black and white tv
Days of our lives
The glittering prizes

Oil painting
Roasting chestnuts on an open fireplace

The Massey Technosoc Scroll
B.Tech and The Technocrats

100 watt. Yamaha stereo systems
Pogus’ 3 watt valve amp (mono!)
Vinyl LPs
Hitchhiking to Wellington for NZSO concerts
Mahler and Shostakovich
Herbert von Karajan
$2.00 for a Chinese dinner

Rob Muldoon
Rob’s Mob
Security intelligence service
SIS legislation
Wanganui Police computer

End of national conscription
NZ exits Viet Nam war … a precursor to exiting ANZUS a dozen years later.
NZ opens diplomatic relations with China
Mao and Joe Walding
Death of Norman Kirk
Our first time voting in a national election
The Values Party (The world’s first ‘Green party’, according to Alvin Toffler)
RAS Rob Shirley and his territorial army/weekend warrior recruits
NZUSU sports festival
 

Blue jeans and tea shirts
Water bombs
Flour bombs
Procesh
A toilet glued down (with Araldite?) somewhere on the Palmerston North Square
Anarchic disruption of the Massey Anarchists foundation meeting
The Mini on top of the vet tower
The Austin Fairline? Sheerline? Whatever… A huge grey Rolls Royce-sized car that Mac owned?

Bob Doran’s PLI programming puzzles
Punch cards
Boxes of punch cards
Operating systems and compilers
Algol v PLI

Two brands of beer Lion and DB … and occasionally Tui
A flagon of port
Montana Pearl
Cold duck
Veluto Rosso wine
Montana Sauternes or was it McWilliams?
Liebestraum
Blue nun
… And that was pretty much the choice of wines!

Student allowances
Bursary and schol
Summer work in the abattoirs or hay paddocks

The court hostels
City court
Rotary court
Terms and finals

Jones and his once per term clothes washing expedition … home
Jones and his pet mouse
Crun and Pog
Gus the black samoid dog
Hoop, Helen and Noon. Alyson. Rob Kay. Nev Jeans. Pramda L. Ronald L. Phil J.
Pogic - Peter’s creative logic 

Bachelor of Technology students at Massey University, 1973

(Author: top right)

I remember watching the series The Glittering Prizes on tv (Fredrick Raphael). (Clearly, whilst I was doing postgraduate studies in the late 1970s)  Similar to the book I have just started reading (Faulks: Engleby) it was set in the then contemporary period of the fifties through the seventies following the progress of Oxbridge graduates get jobs. Get married. Have affairs. Have crises.Tom Conti was one of the actors. I recall the events seemed absolutely fantastic compared with our lives and how we imagined they might unfold. In the ‘unbelievable fantasy’ sense of the word. Incredible. Ten years later (I guess) I re-read the book and it all seemed far more credible and close to home! strange. I can’t recall any other tv programs we might have watched. Perhaps the tv blew up and or we didn’t watch tv much.

To start at the very top of the list you might recall that -music was stored employing scratches inflicted on disks of black polyvinyl chloride. When a student flat possessed 100 LPs it would arrange a continuous playing of the 100 said lps commencing mid Friday afternoon interspersed with grog and greasies (Beer, fish, and chips). At 45 mins per LP I estimate 75 hours. A long sleepless weekend! Perhaps just one side for each LP? Hence ‘thon’, an abbreviation of marathon.

I recall that for our thon held at The Wynd (88 Grey Street. Now flattened and replaced with an office block) I was restricted to play just one side only from my 14 volume set of Mahler Von Karajan symphonies. Can’t think why! Probably the fifth, since I was proceeding through all the great composer’s fifth symphonies at that time. Try it sometime!

I think we invented Multinational Monopoly during our thon. Multinational Monopoly required two Monopoly boards and required two full time bankers who adjusted financial parameters such as the salary level, financial transactions tax rate on each board and the travel fare between each board. Each banker’s aim was to increase the wealth of ‘their’ citizens as they traveled form country to country buying properties and collecting rents. We never finished a game as I recall. 

Hope this brings back interesting memories for any Massey student from the 70s.

PS
The ch**** mile.

PPS

Curious. My Zemanta blog-writing helper makes no connection with the NZ Values Party, Waddington’s Monopoly, Sebastian Faulks, Monty Python, or the Goon Show.

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