Born in 2012

If you were born in 2012, Gillard's minority government was still functioning and legislating — the National Disability Insurance Scheme was passed, the carbon price was operating, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was established after Gillard's announcement in November. The achievements were significant and real. The politics were also vicious — the relentless campaign against Gillard was personal, sexist, and unrelenting, and her Misogyny Speech to parliament in October, delivered in response to Tony Abbott, became one of the most watched parliamentary speeches in Australian and global history, going viral before that was entirely the right word.

It was two minutes of controlled fury and it resonated because it named something true. The London Olympics gave Australia a relatively modest medal haul by recent standards, and the national sporting conversation was frank about what had changed and what needed to change. The Ashes in England was lost.

Shane Warne was on Twitter and television simultaneously. The housing market in Sydney and Melbourne was beginning its extraordinary acceleration. The flat white was $4.

The smartphone was now in every pocket. The beach at Christmas was still free and the sunburn was still real and the country was still, underneath all of it, itself.