Born in 1954

If you were born in 1954, the Queen visited Australia for the first time and the country went absolutely spare with excitement. Every city on the royal tour turned out in the hundreds of thousands — people stood for hours on the footpath, children waved small flags, Menzies was barely able to contain his joy. It was the largest mass gathering Australia had ever seen, and the warmth was genuine.

The Petrov Affair broke in April — a Soviet spy defection that caused a political scandal and gave Menzies a useful wedge against Labor — and suddenly the Cold War felt very present, even here at the bottom of the world. Television was coming: the government had announced it in time for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, and the sense of anticipation was extraordinary. Rock and roll was still arriving in filtered form — the wireless played Bill Haley and some Nat King Cole, but the parents were mostly in charge of the dial.

Kids rode their bikes to the local pool, swapped Phantom comics, and spent their pocket money on Violet Crumble bars and spearmint chews. The suburb was the world: the milkman doing his rounds before dawn, the iceman's truck, the baker's van, the school with its asphalt playground and wire fence. Life was known, reliable, and going slowly but unmistakably towards something modern.