I don't remember anything of the Sydney I was born into in 1958. It was, undoubtedly, a different town to the one I visit regularly today. Recollections from early childhood rarely begin much before three years of age and I am afraid that the 3 or 4-year-old me would have little of interest to recall. The Russians may or may not have had a device aimed at my hometown, the Beatles may yet to have been formed and trams still plied their trade through Sydney streets, but I remained in short-panted ignorance of anything but my immediate needs.

Today I found in another post the following photo of Central Station, dated 1958. It is one of those curiosities that stops one, a scene at once familiar (the vast arch of the station) and unfamiliar (the long-gone shops spilling onto the concourse), for I walk through this space at least once a week. I wonder if the all-night service really ran all night, and what refreshments it served? How much stamina, do you think, did the trousers need to have to deal with an Australian summer and winter? What of the man in the dust coat (recalling Ronny Barker, surely) and the gentlemen reading at the far end of the newsagency? What magazine, exactly? And the ubiquitous milk bar, now a rarity.

Philip Larkin completed his magnificent The Whitsun Weddings in October 1958, a poem based upon another railway journey in another country. The first verse reads-

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
The river’s level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

Larkin gradually becomes aware that traditional Whitsun Weddings were underway at every small stop and station along the line and reflects on this "frail travelling coincidence." I suspect that many such paths crossed at Sydney's Central Station. Though the pace is faster, indicative of the impatience of our time, it is still happening now.