The Over the Top with Jim Album

First published: 1995

Many Australians are interested in our past, and especially in the 1940s and 1950s. So as a companion to my memoir Over the Top with Jim, this book is a collection of photographs and memorabilia. It was designed and illustrated by my young friend David Mackintosh, who now works very successfully in London. (You can see some of his current 2013 work on tumblr.) David had never seen a Brisbane tram, and called a shilling “the sheep’s head coin”. He showed me how good design can present a mood as well as facts. So working on the book together was an education for us both. The photographs – gathered from friends and libraries – capture Australia in the past, including all the people and places who appear in the original memoir. We added magazine advertisements of those household products and artefacts which you don’t often see these days, such as Hypol, Kay’s Compound Essence, and even a pump-action Mortein flyspray can. Soon these items will have moved out of living memory, so it is pleasing to capture them together in one book.