I grew up in Goulburn, which is a large country centre in NSW Australia, although not as big as Newcastle. All of the decent size country centres had cafes, or milk bars as we called them, in the main street, and a good proportion of them were called something like the Paragon or the Parthenon for some reason. We had our own Paragon Cafe, which was the embodiment of the typical Oz 50's cafe. As well as drinks and milkshakes, they did things like hamburgers, mixed grills and the like. I don't remember ever seeing anything like the American drugstore. In my teenage years I was aware that they existed over there from watching TV shows, but they were a foreign idea to us.

A couple of years ago when we were passing through Goulburn, we went and had a meal in the Paragon Cafe - still in the same place, a bit more up-market now than I remember it being, but I'm happy to say that it has been well looked after, enlarged, and with many of the art deco features, including the mirrored walls, lovingly preserved. In a world of change it's nice to find some of the old things being kept. In fact, Goulburn seems to do a pretty good job of looking after a lot of its historical features.

Milkshakes were milk with syrup (usually chocolate, caramel, vanilla, banana or strawberry) added from a small cup with a long handle, malt powder if you wanted it malted, and finished off with a generous scoop of icecream. Then the large aluminium cup was put under the machine and mixed. I have a smaller version of a milkshake maker at home, and I used to have one of the aluminium cups too, but it got lost along the way. I now have large plastic ones of the same size. They mostly seem to use cardboard takeaway cups these days. I never heard mention of frappes back then, but I have to say that MacDonalds makes a pretty decent one.

What some have described as 'spiders' we called 'ice cream sodas' when I was a kid living in Goulburn. I think they were made with lemonade, syrup and icecream. It might have been just the soft drink with icecream, but I don't think so - I seem to remember them adding syrup. I remember having red ones (which had the flavour of a creaming soda) and lime ones. I don't remember hearing them called spiders till I moved to Sydney.

Some time last year, we discovered a place on Glebe Point Road which still makes spiders, and they are every bit as good as I remember them. I had a lime spider.

I miss icecream being the way it was in the 50's, with little bits of ice in them. It's too creamy now. I remember getting icecreams at the movies when I was a little kid - a single cone was threepence and a double cone was sixpence.

Another random thing I remember from about 1960 is blue iceblocks. I think the flavour was boysenberry. Also, they were round, like a long cylinder. Don't think blue ones were around for long, because blue is generally not thought of as a proper colour for food. They used to colour things like kerosene blue, so that little kids wouldn't think it was drinkable.

Anyway, that's enough rambling around the past for now. Think I might go and make myself a milkshake!