The metric system may well be almost 50 years old in Australia, but old habits die hard when it comes to measuring, writes Robert Drewe.

My 14-year-old daughter came into the room with an announcement. “Guess what? I’m nearly five foot seven now,” she said proudly. “And I’m still growing. I reckon I’ll easily reach five foot eight.”

“What’s all that in centimetres?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “Dunno. One-seventy-something?”

The metric system of measurements officially began in Australia 49 years ago but common usage often shuns decimals and prefers the old imperial system. Acres are still to be found all over the real estate world; cricket pitches are still 22 yards; furlongs hang on in horse-race calling; and, for safety reasons and uniformity between countries, aviation measurements are always in feet.

The Australian Dream is still a house on a quarter-acre block. Your new plasma TV screen (and teenage boys) boast their size in inches; vehicle tyre pressure is measured in pounds per square inch; new parents like to announce their babies’ birth weights in pounds; ships, planes and winds like their speed in knots; and, as every surfer knows, wave height comes in feet.

If something is far distant, as we all know, it’s miles and miles away.

Literature doggedly hangs on to the imperial system, too. Metric just doesn’t have the same ring to it. How irritating it is when a pedantic book editor changes a line like “Uncle Tom was now six feet under” to “Uncle Tom was now 182 centimetres under”. Or, “Frank drank a gallon of grog last night” to “Frank drank 4.5 litres of grog last night”. Believe me, it has happened.

Would the best-selling novel by Erskine Caldwell have been so successful if it had been called “God’s Little Half Hectare”? And Robert Frost’s famous poetic line loses something if it becomes “And Kilometres To Go Before I Sleep”.

Anyway I then subjected my daughter to a nostalgic blast from the imperial past, a time when the back covers of our primary school exercise books all carried an incredible list of length, area, weight, volume and money tables, and times tables as well.

Inches, feet, yards, acres, miles, pints, pounds, furlongs and pennies, she’d heard of, but for the rest I might have been talking Swahili.

“Stones?” she said. “Ounces? Hundredweights? Pecks? Bushels? Knots? Chains? Halfpennies? Fathoms? Guineas? Drams? Gills?” and that was before we got onto rods, poles, perches and roods. As for virgates (30 acres) and hides (four virgates), fortunately they never crossed my path.

Perhaps roods, rods, poles and perches have proved to be invaluable in your adult professional and private lives. For myself, not so much.

At school, all these complicated measurements (whose origins went back centuries to Rome and early Britannia and make really interesting reading now I don’t have to study them) seemed to exist purely as tests for mental arithmetic, the subject we knew then as Mental.

Mental was well named. After lunch of a Friday afternoon on a hot summer’s day, Mental could really do your head in, although when the temperature reached 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40.5 Celsius) we were allowed to go home.

To prepare you for a period of Mental, you had to chant all the times tables, from two to 12. If you were lucky enough to be outside the classroom cleaning dusters, or visiting the toilet, the rhythmic chant of 40 distant voices shouting “Six eights are 48! Seven eights are 56!” sounded like a Nuremberg rally. (But, unlike today’s schoolkids, I’ve never forgotten my times tables.)

Fortunately, Mental was usually followed by Manual, during which the rods, poles and perches, and Farmer John with his 12 hens and 13 geese, three pigs, four ducks, six turkeys and 17 cows (*how many farm birds does Farmer John have?) could quickly fade from our bursting brains.

Manual, not surprisingly, was the opposite to Mental. It was divided strictly on gender lines. Boys did woodwork, cutting things out of three-ply with fret-saws, and girls sewed or French-knitted, although the creation of Mothers’ Day hessian potholders, Father’s Day clay ashtrays, and siblings’ Christmas-present cardboard-and-wool book protectors were unisex activities.

Perkins’ Paste, Clag and plasticine were also gender-neutral construction aids, used to make papier-mache puppets and regarded by some of the Mental strugglers as tasty foodstuffs.

Like the cube-shaped yellow erasers, which some boys seemed to confuse with cheese, they provided many a mid-afternoon snack, at least until the hungrier kids were on their way home and could continue consuming the leather straps of their schoolbags.

My daughter was rolling her eyes by this stage of my primary school reminiscences.

“You’re lucky to have the decimal system,” I told her.

“And calculators,” she said.

* Farmer John had 35 birds.

Robert Drewe’s most recent books The Local Wildlife and Swimming to the Moon are on sale here: penguin.com.au/RobertDrewe

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