Just another little serving of condensed milk and its uses

Richard Kirby of Campbelltown has less pleasant memories of condensed milk (C8, too much, lately) after camping at Hill End as a teenager. “It was the last day, we had been shooting rabbits on the common, breakfast was a combination of what was left. We had scrambled eggs with condensed milk. Once tasted never forgotten and never repeated. But we were hungry, so down it went.”

Then, a condensed milk-adjacent memory from Judith Rostron of Killarney Heights: “On a hard bushwalk in New Zealand with strictly limited food, I was delighted to find some wild raspberries growing outside one of the huts. Not only that, but someone had lightened their pack by leaving behind a can of evaporated cream. What a treat.”

Now, unusually, a non-culinary memory. Anne Pell of Cooks Hill tells us: “As a little girl in England during the late 1940s, I recall my mother using a dab of condensed milk to stick the ceramic tiles onto the hearth of the fireplace after they had been knocked off by energetic sweeping. The tiles never fell off again.”

“Me, me!” cries Garry Thomas from Oatlands. “I was listening when you said no more condensed milk stories [C8 Thursday]. I was never interested in the stuff, and with all this conversation, I’m becoming increasingly less interested in trying it.” One more brave lad saved from going down the path to dairy ruin, thanks to Col8ers.

On a non-condensed milk subject: questions often arrive at C8 about pronunciations and mis-pronunciations, especially of town names. Judy Archer of Nelson Bay would like to discuss Wauchope. “A lovely reader on Radio 2RPH,” she says, “reads Column 8 every day. She called ‘Wauchope’ ‘Watch-hope’. My niece calls it, ‘Woo-chop-eee’.” C8, not a native of the area, has always thought it was “War-hope”, but is open to alternative views from any Wauchopians out there.

Now, one last word on the Last Telephone Exchange argument, David Gordon of Cranebrook, archivist at the Communications Museum Sydney (Yes, it’s a real place), says: “West Wyalong was cutover to automatic working on May 15, 1985. The West Wyalong Advocate had explained the day before that, ‘Subscribers in the Ungarie, Tullibigeal and Lake Cargelligo areas will continue to book their calls through the manual exchanges operating in their towns even though the calls will go through the automatic system in West Wyalong. No date has yet been set for the switch-over to automatic dialling in these three centres’.”

Column8@smh.com.au

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