With this in mind, the Oral History Group looked at the jobs they had in the past and how they had changed.

We had six farmers in our group this month and they could easily pick the changes in the way they used to work.

For Jeff it was sheep dipping, cattle branding and when the change came from single-shot guns to automatic.

“They certainly saved a lot of time,” he said.

As Keith said: “machinery has changed everything”.

Rob, Tim and Bruce nodded in agreement and told of the backbreaking work which they used to do by lifting and loading everything manually.

They all agreed with Russell that airconditioned headers made all the difference in hot conditions, while motorbikes saved many weary legs as cattle were rounded up.

Tim remembered the time when we had only manual party line phones which were connected from 9am until 5pm, although the country telephonists did a wonderful job of keeping people in touch.

Keith had memories of ploughing in the old days.

“We would try to pick out a dot on the horizon and follow that to keep a straight line,” he recalled.

“There was a chap who picked out his spot and, keeping his eye on it, kept on ploughing in what he thought was a straight line until he found he was following a sheep.”

Elma, Glenna and Gillian were all teachers and the thing which stood out for Elma was the fact that when she began teaching in the 1950s she was paid only 75 per cent of the men’s wages.

“I was told that the men got more because they opened the windows,” she said with some annoyance.

Glenna, who attended Balmain Teachers College, remembers the way the student teachers were treated like the children they were to teach, which certainly wouldn't be acceptable today.

The slide rule was an important part of equipment in Gillian’s job of teaching physics, until it was replaced by computers.

Nursing now requires a university degree but in the days when Dot, Lynne and Kerrel were nursing, the skills were studied in the hospital itself.

In fact, they started at the bottom and worked their way up, dealing with patients right from the start.

“We had a very hands-on approach,” Dot said.

“We nursed the whole patient,” Lynne said.

“We fed them and looked after pressure points and talked to them,” added Kerrell.

When antibiotics and vaccination against infectious diseases came in things were very different, according to Dot.

With the progress of technology nursing has taken on an entirely new look and many more lives have no doubt been saved, but we wondered if the personal touch has been lost in the transition.

Wendy had been a television presenter in the early days of Queensland TV and she had a glamorous publicity photo to prove it.

“It was quite different from nowadays when news is syndicated and everything is pre-recorded,” she said.

“We read the news items from the Telex and often straight out of the newspaper. We had to know what we were doing and finish on time right down to the last second.”

Doreen was a cadet journalist.

“We attended town meetings and accidents with pen and paper, gave our story to the sub editor who corrected it and sent it to be printed. It was a dirty, noisy atmosphere but now it is quite different.”

John worked in publishing and, as a rep for Macmillan, travelled with a bag of books, samples and  covers which today have been replaced by a laptop.

The railways have changed a great deal since Tom was working on them.

“We used to employ 600 men between Parkes and Broken Hill and now it takes one man to press a button in Newcastle to change the points at Broken Hill and bring the train from South Australia.”

Barbara was in the spinning department at the Woollen Mills and Mick drove a horse and cart to make his deliveries for Mackies Store.

However, Monica and Doreen R. were the real workers, bringing up large families without the labour-saving devices we have today.

Dick had taught at TAFE and was involved in engineering and aviation as well.

He found the change from the imperial to metric system of measurement very challenging.

“I ran an employment agency,” said Pauline. “We used to train people how to present themselves for an interview, but today it is mostly done online.”

Our newest member Alex had served in Bomber Command during the war, but joined Melbourne University afterwards and was asked to be part of the C.S.I.R., which was backed at the time by TAFE and dealt with industrial research.

“That has all changed,” he said. “Now TAFE is all about training for trades.”

We finished the meeting with a greater knowledge of each other and voted it a great success.