Born in 1989

If you were born in 1989, Australia was in its last year of the long prosperity before the recession that Keating would famously call "the one we had to have." The decade had been good — rising incomes, a modernising economy, the cultural confidence of *Crocodile Dundee* and INXS and the Sydney Opera House and the America's Cup. But the economists were uneasy, and Keating was beginning to raise interest rates in ways that made mortgage holders wince.

The Berlin Wall fell in November and the television news was astonishing — the footage of people with hammers on the Wall, the crowds flowing through Checkpoint Charlie, the Cold War visibly ending. In Australia, the immediate effects were less seismic, but the sense of a world changing shape was real. *Neighbours* was still enormous in Britain and producing stars: Jason Donovan was having a pop career alongside Kylie.

The MCG had another magnificent Grand Final. The beach was as it had always been. The corner served a flat white — the coffee culture was quietly beginning, the Italian expresso machines that had been in Melbourne cafes for years starting to move to Sydney and Brisbane.

The country was in a good decade's end mood, not yet knowing the early nineties were going to hurt.