Born in 2024

If you were born in 2024, Taylor Swift arrived in Australia in February for the Eras Tour and the country simply stopped. The concerts in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide — 600,000 tickets sold, economic activity in the hundreds of millions of dollars, friendship bracelets traded outside venues, grown women weeping at "All Too Well (Ten Minute Version)" — were a cultural event of a scale that defied easy description. Taylor Nation had arrived on Australian soil and it had done so with characteristic intensity.

Swifties had planned their outfits for months, had driven interstate, had paid extraordinary resale prices, and not a single person present reported anything other than three and a half hours of pure joy. The cost of living crisis was the dominant political story of the year — mortgage holders crushed by the Reserve Bank rate rises that had lifted the cash rate from 0.1 per cent to 4.

35 per cent in less than two years, renters in Sydney and Melbourne spending over 30 per cent of their income on housing, grocery prices elevated and stubborn. The housing affordability crisis was no longer a future problem — it was a present reality for an entire generation. Albanese's government was navigating it with mixed success.

The Australian cricket team were competitive, the AFL season as keenly contested as ever, Ash Barty's retirement leaving a gap in the national tennis story that nobody had quite filled. But the country was resilient — it always had been — and the beach at Christmas was as it had always been, the sprinkler in the backyard on New Year's Day, the smell of sunscreen and cut grass and something cooking on the barbie. The same constants.

The same country. Still going.