Born in 2007

If you were born in 2007, Kevin Rudd won the November election and Australia's longest-serving prime minister since Menzies was finally gone after eleven years. Howard lost his own seat of Bennelong, the first sitting prime minister to do so since 1929, and the symbolism was enormous. Rudd — earnest, hardworking, slightly robotic, deeply competent — represented a generational change, and his first act as Prime Minister was to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, a deliberate signal about climate change.

His second act was to formally apologise to the Stolen Generations in February 2008, a moment of extraordinary emotional weight that people watched with tears on their faces. But in 2007, the anticipation and the election itself were the story. Kevin07.

Australians went to the polling booth with a sense that something had been going on too long and it was time for change — the same instinct that had elected Whitlam in 1972 and Hawke in 1983. The housing market was now a genuine national obsession, prices in Sydney and Melbourne seeming detached from any rational connection to wages. The flat white was $3.

50. The AFL Grand Final was watched by four million people. The summer cricket was Australian cricket's last golden summer before a long transition.

Baz Luhrmann was making *Australia* in the Kimberley. Things felt like they were beginning.