SHOPPING.

Before Miron writes about his holiday in Melbourne as he now tend to think of it to have been. Miron would like to describe the shopping. When you bought groceries from the supermarkets in the nineteen seventies, they had brown paper bagsof two sizes, big – large bags and smaller ones that were half the size. All your groceries were packed into them, they were the shopping bags then.

They weren’t made from recycled paper either, rather, they were made of good paper that was produced from wood chipping of the trees and destroying thousand of akers of rain forests. The shopping bags for groceries these days, are made of plastic and unacceptable by many people. The recycled paper was used for other things like toilet paper and so on.

Fish and chips stores wrapped the hot, take away food in either white wrapping paper by now or brown wrapping paper, but raw meat and fish were still being wrapped in old newspapers and magazines as you still see them doing in backward countries like the Philippines now in this day and age. Writing paper and envelopes were all made from good paper and they were expensive comparing to the prices of today.

The old imperial sizes were smaller but good quality. A pack of plain white envelopes of twenty, were two dollars and fifty cents. Now you can buy packs of fifty of either Air Mail or white long ones for the same price or less, they are cheaper because it’s all rewcycled paper. Before the advent of recycled paper, the short envelopes were two dollars and fifty cents for twenty, long ones were dearer, sfter the recycled paper came in, everybody had a craze for it.

Lot of stationery that was made from wood chips ended up being being liquidated in auctions and thrift shops after it was donated to the charities because nobody would buy it. Even now, you look in Auctions around the country of Australia, liquidation and charity shops, you can still find stationery that’s made from wood chips because at times, they were given so much of it that they would be pushing it for years and years before somebody like Miron comes along and buys the whole lot in bulk, and as the old saying goes, BEGGARS CAN’T BE CHOOSERS.

Some types of recycled paper that Miron gets now, tears apart in his hands and the same goes for envelopes. Send a letter interstate, it went by train unless you specified that you want it to go by Air Mail, by using an Air Mail sticker or an envelope, they didn’t have the same price for everything and they didn’t have a letter gauge, it generally all went by weight on the skyals.

If you sent a letter to another country, it was cheaper to send it open, if it was sealed, the price was somewhat dearer, not anymore because there’s one standard price, so if you send your letter open, the postal employees will read it, if they didn’t like the content of it, they would destroy it and your letter would never reach the destination that it’s bound for.

Brown paper shopping bags were popular, they were tough, recyclable for waste paper, they could be doubled up as garbage bags afterwards, used for wrapping parcels in, cut up to use as note paper to write on or cut into pages for letter writing, people would either burn them or tear them up to compost their garden with also. Everybody had incinerators. Recycling of waste in the Philippines now is a big problem. Paper and cardboard are still burnt and used to compost the garden with.