Born in 1990

If you were born in 1990, the good times of the eighties came to a fairly abrupt halt. The recession arrived properly in 1990 and 1991 — unemployment rising sharply, businesses collapsing, the housing market stalling. Paul Keating's phrase "the recession we had to have" was honest but politically costly.

Families who had stretched themselves to buy in the late eighties were now paying very high interest rates for houses that had dropped in value. It was genuinely hard. But Australian cultural life remained vital: the music scene was extraordinary — the Clouds, the Hummingbirds, You Am I in formation, Died Pretty, the Hard-Ons — alternative music was a real thing in Australian pubs.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were making extraordinary records from Berlin. The AFL Grand Final — the competition had become national and renamed in 1990 — drew massive crowds. *Muriel's Wedding* and the Australian films that would define the early nineties were being written.

The beach was still free, the barbie was still in the backyard, and on a Saturday morning the smell of sausages from the hardware store community fundraiser was pure Australian life. The country was going through something hard and would come out the other side.