Born in 1952

If you were born in 1952, Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne at twenty-five following the death of her father King George VI, and Australia — still very much a British nation in its loyalties and its self-image — felt the event deeply. The Queen's Coronation was still a year away, but the preparations and tributes began immediately, and the butcher put her portrait in his window and the schoolchildren wrote essays about her. Menzies, who adored the royal family with an unabashed fervour that sometimes embarrassed people, was perfectly in step with the national sentiment.

Australian Rules football was drawing crowds of 80,000 to the MCG on Grand Final day, and in Sydney the rugby league was generating the same passionate devotion. The first overseas migrants were settling into the cities and beginning to change the texture of the place — the Greek milk bar owner who stayed open till nine, the Italian market gardener who brought tomatoes bigger than anything locally grown. Rock and roll hadn't quite arrived yet, and the wireless still played sentimental ballads and variety shows.

The new Housing Commission estates around the cities were filling up with young families grateful for the rent subsidy, the small backyard, the corrugated iron fence. It was not a grand life, but it was solid and it was theirs.