A Short Trip Down Confabulation Lane

Melbourne Sundays were pretty dire before 1989. Not much was open, apart from churches and your local milk-bar, which was very likely to be picketed by hard-line Sabbatarians. There was nothing on television or radio, not one CBD restaurant or cinema was open and neither was the NGV. The gates of the Botanical Gardens were firmly shut and padlocked, all the pubs were closed - well, you get the picture.

I was reminded of all this by Steve Foley's reflections on the coming 20th anniversary of The Sunday Age:

Twenty years on, Victoria is no longer the ''odd state'' or, as early advocates put it, ''one of the few places of its size in the developed world without large-circulation Sunday papers''. In no small way the advent of the Sundays transformed the day itself. Shedding its ''sleepy town'' image, Melbourne finally matured into the upscale version of the civilised society it always maintained it should be.