Born in 1948

If you were born in 1948, you arrived in a year of significant national stocktaking. The Chifley government was pressing ahead with the Snowy Scheme and trying, against fierce opposition, to nationalise the banks — the banks won in the end, but the argument showed a country still deciding what kind of place it wanted to be. Don Bradman played his last Test series in England, scoring 6996 runs at an average so extraordinary it barely seemed real, and when he was dismissed for a duck in his final innings at The Oval, needing just four runs for an average of exactly 100, the whole country felt the particular pang of something irreplaceable passing.

Australian Rules football was pulling massive crowds at the MCG, and in rugby league country the Saturday arvo was sacred. Kids collected cigarette cards, rode their bikes to the river, and spent Saturday mornings at the picture theatre for the serial and two shorts. The migrant camps outside Bonegilla and Bathurst were filling with newcomers learning English from newspapers and the wireless.

You could buy a house in the new estates around Sydney for about £2,000, and the fibro and tile was going up street by street. Life was modest, physical, neighbourly, and fundamentally decent.