another country

The post-World-War-2 decade is a wasteland—a political wasteland under Robert Menzies, and an emotional wasteland. The 1950s is the decade John Howard wants to revisit when he says he wants Australians to feel relaxed and comfortable.

Nothing much happens in Australia in the 1950s. We’re suffering some sort of collective torpor, a communal passivity. We rebuild after the war, relationships bruised by long separations and what war does to men. Migrants are imported to dig a hole in the Snowy Mountains and make a river run backwards.

Everyone is numb after six years of war. No energy remains. No one has any passion and no one seems to care. We children of the 50s grow up in an emotional vacuum. We roam far and wide; as long as we appear at the dinner table just after six all is well.

Big Brendan drops in the books for our owners’ corporation and by chance we discover that we both grew up in Warrnambool. He recalls the time: his father works in the Kraft factory at Allansford and Brendan does as he pleases in the Hopkins River. No posse of protective mothers comes near the place. My friend Sandy tells me that as a small girl she knew every drain under Ballarat. Her parents know nothing of her subterranean wanderings.

I play on the railway tracks, unpeel chewing gum from the road and eat it, jump off the garage roof, and generally defy death to take me. I ride on the tray of Gus Kelly’s small truck—no sides. I regularly stub my big toes and rip the skin off them, but never break a bone. I get no diseases, meet with no disasters.

The past is indeed another country.

Rock on.