Born in 2009

If you were born in 2009, Black Saturday arrived on February 7th and the country was not prepared for what it brought. The bushfires that swept through Victoria on the hottest, driest, windiest day ever recorded — 46.4 degrees in Melbourne, catastrophic fire danger ratings — killed 173 people and destroyed more than 2,000 homes.

Whole communities — Kinglake, Marysville, Strathewen — were devastated. The television coverage was harrowing. The inquiry that followed was comprehensive.

The national response — volunteers, donations, the community arriving with casseroles and building materials and just themselves — was everything that's good about the country. The Prime Minister wept at the memorial service. The football season, which should have been about football, was coloured by grief for half the year.

The mining boom was making Perth feel like a different country from the rest of Australia — wages and property prices elevated by the resources sector. Kevin Rudd was still popular, the stimulus packages having worked, climate change legislation being prepared. The ETS that would eventually help destroy his prime ministership was in the pipeline.

The beach at Christmas was as it had always been, and the community that gathered for the surf carnival and the cricket on the oval still felt like the real Australia.