Born in 1943

If you were born in 1943, Australia was deep in the Pacific war and the Kokoda Track had already become legend. The fighting along that jungle ridge in Papua New Guinea — our young diggers pushing back the Japanese advance in conditions of almost unimaginable hardship — had gripped the whole country. Every family seemed to have someone in uniform somewhere.

Rationing was a way of life: the ration book sat on the kitchen bench beside the sugar canister, and clever housewives stretched every scrap. American GIs were everywhere — in the pubs, on the footpaths, at the dances — and the cultural collision was fascinating and occasionally tense. "Oversexed, overpaid, and over here" was the muttered joke among the men, though the women who received nylons and Lucky Strikes perhaps took a different view.

At the picture theatre, newsreels showed Allied advances in North Africa, and the audience clapped. Kids collected shrapnel as trophies, rolled bandages for the Red Cross, and grew vegetables in the backyard victory garden. The wireless brought Vera Lynn and Bing Crosby into the kitchen while Mum cooked lamb and vegetables and tried to make a pound of butter last the fortnight.

The beach was still there, the surf still came in, and on quiet evenings you could almost forget the world was on fire.