Born in 1965

If you were born in 1965, Australia was being drawn, reluctantly and controversially, into the Vietnam War. The Menzies government introduced conscription by ballot — the birthday ballot, they called it — and twenty-year-olds waited to see if their marble would be drawn. The anti-war movement was small yet but it was beginning, and the arguments at the kitchen table between the fathers who remembered Kokoda and the sons who questioned this new war were the arguments of a country working out what it believed.

The Rolling Stones toured and caused the expected moral outrage in the newspapers and the expected delight among the teenagers. *Countdown* was still nine years away, but *Bandstand* was the Saturday morning television ritual, and the transistor radio was in every teenager's back pocket. The backyard was still the social centre of family life — the Hills Hoist, the lemon tree, the wire fence with the neighbour's dog that barked at everything.

Surf culture was now fully established as Australian mythology: the bronzed lifesaver on the Saturday arvo, the board wax and the zinc cream, the patois of the surf club. Australian tennis was still world-class — Emerson, Stolle, Newcombe all winning — and the whole country watched Wimbledon in the small hours on the new television. Life was good, and complicated, and getting more complicated.