Title: Remember When

Author: Bob Byrne

Reviewer: Natalie Lincoln

Audience:  Secondary

Remember When… delivers exactly as the cover tells us – “snapshots of Australia from the 50’s to the 90’s”. There is no particular order to the collection, and no contents page, and reading it from front to back as I did, it is fun to turn the page and see what nostalgic part of Australian culture, sport, music or politics is being presented.

The descriptions are brief and accompanied by a photo and as a proud Gen X’er I was reminded of a simpler world and felt a gratefulness for my arguably more carefree childhood. As a teacher, I’m not exactly sure how I would use this but I was wondering if I could use it to add it to my repertoire of ‘back in my day’ things to talk about to students. Given that they generally don’t care, despite how wise and interesting I think I am, I’m not sure they would appreciate the ‘old’ voice with which the information is presented quite as much as someone who lived these eras. Nevertheless, I look forward to having it in our school library and may yet develop a way to engage students with a random page here and there to teach them a bit of the ‘olden days’.