Born in 1980

If you were born in 1980, Australia was starting to feel the early stirrings of a new decade's energy. Bob Hawke was still the head of the ACTU, beloved, charismatic, likely to be in politics soon — the sense of anticipation around him was palpable in Labor circles. Fraser was still PM, cautious and correct.

Midnight Oil's *Place Without a Postcard* was making them nationally significant. Cold Chisel's *East* was the album everyone had — "Flame Trees," "Cheap Wine," "Don't Wanna Be the One" — it sounded like every road trip, every pub night, every summer of being young and Australian. Australian cinema was at its peak prestige: *Breaker Morant* was in cinemas and making Australians proud.

The Melbourne Comedy Festival didn't exist yet but the live comedy scene in Carlton and Fitzroy was beginning to produce the names that would matter. The backyard barbie, the corner milk bar (now in decline, now a cultural memory forming), the footy premiership, the Christmas at the beach — these were the constants. You could buy a house in a decent suburb of Sydney for about $70,000, which would seem preposterous within a generation but felt merely expensive then.

The country was at the beginning of something, though nobody quite knew what.