So often we hear "If only I had asked my parents and grandparents about their lives and what it was like growing up." My grandmother said the three saddest words in the English Dictionary were "It's too late.".

The memories recorded in this book are those of my own and my friends' years growing up. They're not famous people, whose everyday lives seem to get lost and we learn nothing of the day-to-day realities of what songs they sang, what they ate, how they got by without the Xbox, digital games and screens. These are some of the questions I hope to answer before it's too late.

Childhood shapes us into the people we become and, try as we may, there is no escaping its influences, or the period in which it's lived. As children we absorb everything going on around us in our immediate environment, and indirectly through the anxieties of our parents, who in turn are affected by what is going on in the world around them. For this reason, it's important to place the children in their time and write a little about world events which had an influence over their formative years and those of their parents.

The stories told here are from those who grew up around the mid twentieth century, just a lifetime away from the children of today, but how vastly different they are. These were the ones who grew up in Australia as part of the complex jigsaw puzzle of the twentieth century.