Life With The

Other Half

There is a grey carpet in the foyer, patterned with strange devices. To the left is the expresso coffee bar. The patrons sit in tiers of chairs behind men steadily figuring at small desks.

Beyond stretches 65 feet or so of polished wood floor, 120 feet wide. At the end of this huge air-conditioned hall is a battery of strange, many-horned objects, twisting and turning like a giant milking machine in convulsions. And above everything else is the continuous clatter of hard rubber hitting on hard wood.

WHAT is it? A ten-pin bowling alley of course Old stuff in America but not a year old in Australia Australians are such suckers for sport in any form it might have been taken as read that this new one would have taken on, but the success of the first venture has confounded alike the optimists and the few critics who condemned it as Yankee nonsense; who said Australians wouldn’t go for that indoor stuff' or contemptuously wrote the game off as “skittles-only more exfirst 10-pin bowling alley was built at Hurstville a

prosperous densely-populated

middle-class suburb on the city’s south side It was completed in 1960 and has been open for business, 9 a.m. to midnight seven days a week ever s i nce ’

At popular periods—such as Saturday night or Sunday mornings— those addicts who know the drill make their bookings long in advance or have a permanent booking Even so there is often a two or three hour wait for a lane.

Australia came late to the bowl ing alley business and thus inherited all the refinements—including the air-conditioning, the soft grey carpet patterned with bowling pins and spots of expresso coffee and ice cream; the electronic devices that set up the pins and return your bowls to you down a subterranean . . ®ut, according to the small book tet that you can buy for 6d at the counter, not always so and tbe Americans did some hard pioneering in the past.

It’s Grown Up

And Respectable

7 7- ——; Up to the 1930 s, 10-pin bowling was considered not quite respect able and was usually confined to men addicts, bowling in some old basement. In the ’3o’s, due to “some far-sighted manufacturers” and the efforts of a few pioneer females, the game took on the aura of a family sport.

Specially constructed buildings began to appear on suburban lots, furnished in much the same way

as today’s bowling alley, but with out the automation.

In those days the motive power was supplied by pinboys, who worked in the pits behind the pins, and set them up for the customers.

But after Pearl Harbour, the supply of pinboys ran out almost overnight, and 10-pin bowling took the count for the duration.

Pinboys were slow to return to the industry after the end of the war and it was not until 1952 that there was a major breakthrough—with the invention of the Automatic Pinspotter by the American Machine & Foundry Co. The day of the pin boy was over for good; and for the

investors in 10-pin alleys, joy was unconfined.

It is this same revolutionary machinery that is now installed in Australian bowling alleys and with it, 10-pin bowling becomes the most automatic, effortless sport in this life.

There is no walking about or use less effort. All you have to do is stand there and hurl large, heavy balls (10 to 16 lb in weight accord ing to your choice) down 62 ft 10i in. of polished wood, 41 in. wide “lane”, and try to knock over the 10 pins arranged triangle fashion at the end of it.

The automatic machine which

comes down from above like fairy in the pantomime, will hi set up the pins for you in the f place, and after your first bowl i remove all the pins and then place any you did not skittle in exact places that your first b left them.

After the second bowl, an an matic gate will sweep all the maining pins into a pit behin and that is the end of the f of the 10 “frames” for which paid your five bob.

While the machine is setting the next ten pins, your ball is turning to you underneath the fl and pops up on a rack beside just as you are ready to comme on your second “frame”.

Now you begin to see why it’ game suited equally to gra: mothers and tiny tots.

Happy Players

Make Happy Shareholders

How long will the craze last? O Australians have taken up a si they never entirely abandon although the boom period may p One of the sights of Sydney w] flying over it at night was the pat work of illuminated night-ter courts. People still play night ten but not in so many numbers as the boom years immediately a; the war.

Sport has now gone indoors night—to squash courts, many which have been established in movie theatres that received coup de grace from television i late hotel closing; and, as we h seen, to 10-pin bowling.

Whatever happens to this sort bowling in the future, the cr period is sure to last long enougl return sharehoders their original vestment and handsome profits side.

It is a better proposition than other post-war amusement impo] tion from the US—the drivt theatre which has suffered al with more orthodox movie theat The Hurstville alley cost ab £55,000 to set up, apart fi the automatic machinery. T machinery belongs to the par American company which receive percentage rake-off from the mo the patron pays.

A second bowling alley went i operation in Sydney recently s there is one in Melbourne near completion, and there are in planned or in course of constr tion —to the delight of enthusias A Five Nights A Weaker One such told me one recent S urday night that he plays on average five nights per week i on Sunday mornings, and that th are hundreds like him.

He looked the average, dehydra type of Australian who could ■

1 50 but was probaby no more 5. But at the other end of le, mother and the youngsters jre in full force, too. Like it i the book, it’s fun for the Family. of the patrons belong to der 40 brigade, with a high ;ion in their teens. It’s a well d crowd, sitting watching the or taking their turn at the There is no skylarking—the the thing. And no scream ds —there’s a nursery for s our five-times-a-week-once day friend who put me right question that apparently is iy every mug onlooker: “What get out of it?” first thing that strikes most -still with that old side-show f skittles as an image at the r the mind—is that it is silly 5/- for the privilege of trying ;k down 10 pins and yet get ;e if you should succeed in said our friend, licking an im after an hour-long game our friends, “thousands of pay money to play on a golf course and they don’t a prize. Ten-pin bowling’s Brent. You can play on your rying to better your last 3r you can bring along a f friends. It’s more fun with 99 ng by the fun the friends aving—in a very quiet way. -y fun goes these days—l say he was dead right. screening in England of a >n film about Norfolk Island )ught numbers of enquiries [ish people interested in set- Norfolk. The film was made siting TV team last year.