What major historical events do you remember?
The first world event I remember is the death of President Kennedy. I was a kid in infants school. The news came through our black-and-white television — one my father built himself, his engineer’s pride sitting square in the corner of the lounge room. We were among the first in our street to have one. The replays flickered across the screen for days; it was the first time I saw adults stop and watch history unfolding on a screen.
A few years later, I was in primary school when Winston Churchill died. I saw the headlines outside the newsagent, large black letters against white paper. My sister had just been born. My mother, still in hospital, missed her own brother’s wedding; we drove six hours north for it. History was in the papers, but our small family history seemed just as momentous.
In high school, we gathered in the school gymnasium to watch Armstrong step onto the moon. Eight hundred students straining to see a man in a bulky suit move across a grainy screen. We held our breath waiting to see if they would succeed. A friend got a puppy soon after and named it Buzz, after the astronaut. That puppy lived and died long ago, yet the real Buzz Aldrin is still alive, ninety-five and counting — a reminder that some stories stretch further than we expect.
At university, I was standing on a railway platform when the loudspeaker announced that the Whitlam Government had been sacked by the Governor-General. A cheer rose from the crowd — I was in a conservative electorate — and I remember thinking how strange it was to hear politics applauded like a football score.
A few years later, walking home from work with a friend, we saw another newspaper headline about a baby that had been taken by a dingo. He guessed, before anyone knew for sure, that it must have happened at Uluru — he’d been there recently and remembered the wild dogs. He was right. I remember the eerie quiet that followed, the way ordinary conversations turned to disbelief.
That’s how I remember history — not as lessons from a book, but as a series of headlines and images that marked the slow unfolding of my own life.
The Afterword 
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