Slides of times Past

SLIDES OF TIMES PAST

by Lindsey Dawson - continuing her Legacy Series

My husband’s just bought a little gizmo from the Warehouse for converting old 35mm slides and negatives to digital format. 

Genius! For years I’ve kept looking at dusty boxes of slides lurking in wardrobes and told myself to throw them out. Keeping them was pointless because who has a clunky slide projector any more? 

But we never did chuck them.  I’m glad now because I’ve been having such fun finding treasure. Sure, 80% of the shots do need to be dumped – all those many nameless lakes and mountains and party scenes full of people you can barely remember. Out they go.  But there are delicious images as well. I’ve found holiday snaps of long-departed parents that bring back so many  memories. And shots of my now grown-up daughters that remind me of their baby years.
And pictures of me, too, that reveal an utterly different time. Like this one. I’m the girl in the middle, looking a bit tipsy in my black lace.  I’m 18 or 19.










I marvel now that I was so good at sewing I could whip up this tricky ball gown with ease.   It has a long, white, bell-shaped skirt of something silky, possibly a fabric called sharkskin.  I think there’s a black satin belt (can’t see it in the picture) with a white fabric camellia pinned at the waist.  My hair has been roller-set and sprayed stiff with lacquer.  We’re at the Peter Pan Cabaret at the top of Queen Street, Auckland. It has a big dance floor. There’s a live band, with blokes in tuxedos playing saxophones.  I have a small glass of something sweet. Gin and lemonade? Light shines on the neck of a tall brown beer bottle in the foreground. Booze packaging is pretty basic in the early 1960s. 

That’s my friend Sue. Note her long kid gloves, unbuttoned at the wrists, the fingers tucked away to expose her hands. That’s how you wear gloves.  Smoking? Well, almost everyone does. We are junior reporters for the Auckland Star. Handsome Bill (nice guy, but we’re just friends) works in sales for BOAC – short for British Overseas Airways Corporation. 

The Peter Pan, the Star and BOAC are long gone, though the airline lives on as British Airways. 

Do you have old slides? Rescue the fun ones. Digitise them. Print them.  And, most importantly, caption them.
As future mementos they’ll only work if people know the context – and get to understand that there was a long-ago time when young women wore gloves almost to their armpits and could, and did, make just about everything in their wardrobes.   
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