This morning, Wednesday 23rd September, 2015, I was having a cup of coffee with my daughter at a shopping centre in Everton Park when a family walked past. The young daughter of that family, I guess about eight years old, a pretty slim girl with longish blonde hair, was wearing a pair of sunglasses. For some peculiar reason this shocked me for a split second and I wondered why.

I got to thinking about when I was the age of this young girl, say about 1952, what would have been said back then about a kid wearing sunglasses.

My Mum and my Dad both possessed sunglasses, and on fairly rare occasions we grabbed them and looked through them and marvelled at how everything underwent an apparent change in colour.  We would have liked to have had our own sunglasses, but in those days, sunglasses for children were absolutely forbidden.  We were told that if we wore sunglasses at all often, then our eyes would be ruined and we would no longer have normal vision.

The grown-ups in our lives, Mum and Dad, the occasional aunt or uncle who visited, our neighbours, the shopkeepers in our town, and so on, would basically wear sunglasses to cut down on glare when driving towards the sun in the morning or afternoon, but otherwise wouldn’t wear them at all. When we went to the beach, where the sun was reflected brightly off the sand and the water, then our parents might wear sunglasses even when they were not driving.

But even at the beach, sunglasses for children were absolutely unthinkable.

As we became older and our family made excursions to the snow, again our parents would use sunglasses to reduce the glare of the sun reflecting off the snow.  But sunglasses for kids were still impossible!

I remember getting my first motorbike licence on 16th July 1964 and beginning to regularly ride my old side-valve BSA to work every day. I wore a canvas flying suit, a pudding-basin helmet, and a pair of goggles to keep the dust and mozzies out of my eyes. I lived at Tyers and worked at the LVWSB in Traralgon. When riding towards the rising sun in the morning and again riding towards the setting sun in the afternoon, I would have to squint to be able to see the road ahead because of the glare of the sun. But I wouldn’t get sunglasses, because they were “bad for my eyes”! See how the mantra with which I had been brought up was affecting my choices as a near adult.

My family moved to Ballarat while I continued working in Traralgon and living at Tyers. Almost weekly, I would ride my motorbike to Ballarat to visit my family and then ride back to Tyers again for the next week’s work. Straining my eyes and squinting hard to try to see where I was riding was giving me a face-ache. I went to Safety House and bought myself some safety sunglasses to wear under my goggles. Wonderful relief!

In the “Green Horror” (universally popular nickname for The Australian Motorcycle News, which was, at that time, printed on green paper) I read an article about a scientific study or survey of some type in Britain which had concluded that motorcyclists lives could be saved if they wore yellow-tinted glasses while riding at night.  So it was back to Safety House where I bought some yellow glasses for night driving. I soon ditched my goggles and just wore safety glasses to protect my eyes while riding.  I also bought a pair of plain safety glasses to wear on dull or rainy days when I judged that darkened glasses were unnecessary.

During the sixties and seventies, I would wear plain glasses during the daytime, sunglasses during the couple of hours per day when glare was a problem, and yellow glasses for riding at night.  I would always made sure that all three sets of glasses were in my kit wherever my motorbike was at any time. So obviously, I still stuck to my childhood upbringing which said that sunglasses were basically bad, unless they were necessary to reduce glare.

During the eighties, I began to need prescription glasses.  For a short time I used clip-on sunglasses attached to my regular prescription glasses, but soon I had prescription sunglasses made for when I was riding a motorbike or driving another vehicle.  I asked about getting yellow prescription glasses made for night riding, but was advised that newer scientific evidence suggested that wearing any kind of tinted glasses or goggles at night was now strongly discouraged as being a dangerous thing to do while riding or driving. It’s funny how ideas change over time!

Now in 2015, my regular prescription glasses are multi-focal so that I can drive, read, and use a computer while wearing the same glasses, and they also change to dark glasses automatically when I am out in the bright sunlight. Additionally I keep two more pairs of prescription glasses in the boot of my sidecar: wrap-around prescription distance-vision sunglasses for riding into the sun, and a pair of wrap-around sunglasses frames with clear distance-vision prescription lenses for riding in normal daylight or at night.

So in practice, I am still more or less sticking to my childhood ideal of using sunglasses only when they are strictly necessary.

But what does everyone else do? My observation here in Queensland is that very large numbers of teenagers and even little children seem to wear sunglasses whether they need them or not.  It is more or less a fashion statement.  Somewhere in the last half a century, things have changed – whether I caught up with them or not!

So thank you to the little girl who caught my attention this morning. I have no idea who you are, but you certainly started this old bloke thinking . . .

I wonder how many ways in my life I am still sticking rigidly to what Mum and Dad taught me donkey’s years ago?