The past, wrote L. P. Hartley in The Go-Between, is a foreign country. Even a decade as relatively recent as the 1950s seems alien to us now. And if it comes to mind at all we feel a quasi-xenophobic superiority. Vapid ‘lifestyle’ magazines sneer at the 1950s as the last gasp of dreary old ‘Anglo’ Australia before the arrival of Mediterranean migrants made garlic and the Gaggia central to our diet and a vineyard sprouting on every sheep paddock.