FED: Mortgage rates echo days of pounds, shillings and pence
By John Coomber03 Feb 2009 5:38 PM
Subject: FED: Mortgage rates echo days of pounds, shillings and pence FED: Mortgage rates echo days of pounds, shillings and pence
SYDNEY, Feb 3 AAP - The last time interest rates were this low, Australians paid their mortgages in pounds, shillings and pence.
It was February 1964, and we lived in a land the nervous first home-buyers of today would barely recognise.
The basic wage was the equivalent of $30.70 a week, which is what most people now earn in an hour.
You could buy a family home on Sydney's North Shore for around $20,000.
A black-and-white television cost a year's pay, a new car about three times as much.
Although their material possessions were paltry by today's standards, Australia's 11 million citizens enjoyed a standard of living considered among the highest in the world.
Indeed Donald Horne was just putting the finishing touches to his seminal work The Lucky Country.
Disaster, however, was about to strike in the waters of Jervis Bay, where on February 10, 1964, the destroyer HMAS Voyager was cut in half in a collision with the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne, with the loss of 82 lives.
It was a huge national shock, reinforced a few months later when Prime Minister Robert Menzies reintroduced national service ("nasho") as Australia stepped up its involvement in the Vietnam War.
Many people were glad to turn their minds to other matters.
If you were lucky enough to own a TV, the programs to watch were a new police drama called Homicide and a risque skit series called The Mavis Bramston Show.
You watched news pictures of Cassius Clay beating Sonny Liston in Miami, and you listened to Bob Dylan's new hit The Times They Are a-Changin'.
Above all, you listened to The Beatles, who were about to arrive for their only tour Down Under, causing a level of public hysteria unmatched before or since.
When the Fab Four were in town, interest rates were the last thing on anyone's mind.
AAP jc/de =0A
FED: Mortgage rates echo days of pounds, shillings and pence