Born in 1953

If you were born in 1953, the Queen's Coronation in June was the event of the year — of the decade, some said. Australians gathered around their neighbours' television sets if anyone had one, or around the wireless more likely, and listened as the BBC broadcast the ceremony from Westminster Abbey. Street parties went up in suburbs across the country, bunting strung between the plane trees, sausage sizzles on the footpath.

Australia had sent wool and butter and soldiers to the Empire and felt, in return, a warm belonging. The Snowy Mountains Scheme was making enormous progress, its tunnels boring through the high country, its workforce of migrants from forty nationalities making it something genuinely historic. Petrol was cheap, the Holden was reliable, and the Saturday drive was a national pastime.

Lolly bags at the pictures cost sixpence and came with milk bottles and musk sticks and those hard little black things nobody ever liked but everyone ate anyway. Phar Lap's heart was on display at the Melbourne Museum and schoolchildren were taken to see it in reverent silence. Australian tennis was ascendant — Lew Hoad and Ken Rosewall were about to announce themselves to the world, and Wimbledon was becoming something Australians expected to win.

The country was proud, comfortable, and still slightly uncertain who it was, exactly.