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Home, Sweet(and Sour) Home On August 15, 19

游客2024-03-05  11
问题                                  Home, Sweet(and Sour) Home
    On August 15, 1945, the day that war ended, Australia was jubilant. A month later it was more wary. In conversations around the teapot on the kitchen table, there was not often a glowing optimism about the future. It was the best and worst of times for the 550,000 Australian servicemen and women who began to return home from the war. Australia then had only seven million people. Regulations and rationing abounded. You could get a job, but not a car. Beer was hard to get, telephone calls hard to make. What we ate was stodge and the clothes we wore were often ill-fitting. Life was dull, but safe. Violent crime was almost non-existent, drugs unknown. The new era of the atom bomb was expected to be unsafe. Many also predicted unemployment would return just as it returned after World War I. And yet many Australians believed that with determination and purpose they might somehow create a better Australia.
    Joseph Chifley, the nation’s Prime Minister, was probably closer to socialism than any other Prime Minister in Australia’s history. A steam locomotive driver for much of his working life, he had educated himself in nearly everything from public finance to literature after he left school, and now in his sixtieth year his chance had come. In Canberra he and his political colleagues sketched plans for providing more social security and economic regulations than Australians had ever known. In the following four years Chifley controlled daily life far more than most Australians would now accept, but in 1945 they gladly accepted regulations in the belief that they were temporary and in the nation’s interest in a time of scarcity and transition. There was regulation of rents, regulation of food prices, regulation of the size and design of new houses, regulation of travel, regulation of the workplace of dentists as well as that of unskilled workers. Even after the war various goods continued to be rationed. People had to hand in a rationing coupon(票据) to buy meat and sugar, butter and tea. Petrol was rationed until 1950. Nearly all communications were still impeded by wartime shortages. In 1942, the sending of congratulatory telegrams for Christmas, New Year or Mother’s Day had been banned, and they did not appear again until the first Christmas after the war. In those days a telegram was delivered by a boy on a government bicycle. At that time most houses in Australia possessed no telephone exchange. You did not dial a number—rather you took the phone off the hook and waited for someone at the telephone exchange to pick up your call and connect the number you requested. The idea of making an overseas phone call just did not enter most people’s heads.
    For a year or so after the war, many goods were too scarce to be rationed and were rarely to be found. Beef and cigarettes were often in short supply. A thousand items available in shops in 1940 could not be bought at the end of 1945. Early in the war tens of thousands of Australians had predicted shortages and put away small hoards of items likely to become unprocurable: Imported tins of salmon and sardines, bottles of Scotch and imported lime juice and perfume, and many kinds of foods and trinkets. Even when the war ended, many people kept their hoards untouched because the scarcity continued.
    Farmers, then as now, were struggling. The typical farm was in debt, either to banks or to country storekeepers, many of whom themselves were in debt. We complain about droughts but in the south-eastern quarter of Australia a typical in land farmer and his wife aged about 50 had experienced more droughts and more dust storms than their children and grand children were to experience. Drought parched most wheatlands in the last phase of the war and towns were blinded by dust storms. In November 1944, some trains were halted by sands drifting onto tracks, irrigation channels were filled by sand in stead of water and a frightened citizen of one country town told the local paper that the end of the world must be in sight.
    To travel in 1945 from a city to a typical farm was to re-enter the 19th century. There was no electric light and no refrigerator. On a few thousand farms the heavy horses were still used for ploughing although the scarcity of labor was so a cute that many farmers turned to tractors—if they could buy one. On Australian farms the wives were renowned for their hard work but in the war most worked even harder.
    Even in the cities of 1945 the typical house did not have many laborsaving amenities(设施). The most common were the electric iron, the ice chest, and the Singer sewing machine that was usually pedaled by foot. Most houses did not own a washing machine. Mum was the washing machine, and the spin-dryer was the wind out of doors. Anyone who walked a long a back lane in a suburb on Monday morning could hear the flapping sound coming from the wet washing that was pegged on the clotheslines in nearby backyards. Passers-by could also smell the wood smoke rising from the washhouse copper where the next batches of clothes were being boiled.
    Television did not exist. The transistor and the car radio had not yet been invented, if you wanted to hear the radio in the open air, you opened the kitchen window and turned up the volume. In the evening, while the radio was turned on, the ironing of shirts and dresses and the knitting, patching and mending of clothes were taking place. In those days, holes appeared frequently in toes and heels of socks, and the women of the house darned them with needle and wool. The nylon socks and drip-dry synthetic shirts belonged to the future.
    Eating habits had changed very little in the previous 40 years. A city restaurant or cafe was a rarity, partly because people had no money to spare on luxuries. On the other hand, some of today’s luxuries were cheap. In Tasmanian towns the scallops and mutton birds were cheap pleasures in season. Crayfish were not yet exorbitant in price, and a laborer on his way home from the pub on Saturday night might halt at the fish and chip shop to buy a large crayfish wrapped in newspaper.
    Nurses and airmen back from the war were often reassured to see familiar sights: The bread always placed on the wood en bread board and cut into slices by the head of the household, who rightly sat at the head of the table. Packaged food was still uncommon. The packet of sliced bread was probably unknown in Australia.
    The idea of a self-service supermarket was unimaginable. In a big city like Sydney, nine of every 10 families lived in walking distance of a grocer’s shop. The grocer himself, with his white apron and lead pencil behind his ear, was the packager. Much of his time was spent behind the fortress-like counter, filling and weighing brown paper bags of sugar, flour, salt and whole meal for the porridge, or bags of biscuits taken by hand from the big tin, and handing them over the counter to the customer.
    Social taboos remained strong. Gambling was virtually prohibited except on the racecourses, and drinking of alcohol was discouraged by the closing of hotels at six o’clock and by the shortage of bottled beer. Divorce was frowned upon: In the whole nation in a typical working week there were only 50 to 60 divorces. Couples were usually married in a church, on a Saturday afternoon, and at their wedding reception the chances were probably 40-60 that no alcohol would be served. A typical marriage involved people of the same religion. A honeymoon in 1945 was almost invariably spent at a nearby resort or city. To travel more than 100 miles for a honeymoon was an adventure and a half. The idea of flying away for a honey moon was inconceivable, for aircraft tickets were expensive and civilian passengers were unlikely to he allotted a seat.
    For several hundred thousand Australians back from the war the excitement of 1945 was finding and keeping a job. Unemployment, close to 10 percent on the eve of the war, was almost down to 1 percent. In those days most boys and girls left school after grade eight and entered the workforce.
    Everywhere was a yearning for the return of big-time sport. International contests, abandoned since 1939, were awaited eagerly by sportstarved fans. The last Test Cricket match had been played at the Oval in August 1938. The ordinary players of games had to wait a while for the return of peacetime equipment. Many tennis bails were hit on the court until they were bald, chipped golf balls were used, and in the playgrounds of schools the children kicked footballs made of tight roiled newspaper.
    In the aftermath of the war the nation was inclined to be very cautious. The future was a puzzle. Nothing could be more contrasting than the optimism after World War I—and the cagey caution of 1945. The soldiers returning from France in 1919 and expecting good fortune had been shabbily treated: They found high unemployment with another war 20 years later. But the soldiers, nurses and airmen returning home in 1945—1946 did not expect too much and were doubly rewarded with an end of full employ melt lasting perhaps a quarter of a century and a freedom from world wars which has now lasted half a century.
选项 A、Y
B、N
C、NG
答案 A
解析 文章第一段就告诉我们二次世界大战后澳大利亚人的心态及生活情况。On August 15，194,5，the day that war ended，Australia was jubilant．A month later it was more war y In conversations…optimism about the future．从这几句话可以看出这句话是正确的，“大多数的澳大利亚人对将来的预见是很小心、谨慎的”。
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