1957

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Share what you know about the year you were born.

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Dear 1957,

You were already busy before I arrived.

You were sketching sails on Sydney Harbour, trusting a bold, improbable vision from a Danish architect, long before anyone knew how hard it would be to build beauty at that scale.

You were awarding Patrick White the first Miles Franklin Award for Voss, quietly affirming that Australian stories could be strange, interior, demanding—and worth the effort.

You were governed by Robert Menzies, who believed universities should not belong only to the privileged few. While I was being carried into the world, he was laying foundations for an expanded, more generous vision of higher education. Decades later, I would find myself leading a college named in his honour, living daily inside the consequences of that conviction.

You were flickering into lounge rooms as television was broadcast with an Australian accent—In Melbourne Tonight, Pick-A-Box—a nation rehearsing how to see itself.

You were singing along with Slim Dusty, discovering that even a pub with no beer could become a shared story, a gold record, a kind of shorthand for belonging.

You were restless in deeper ways too. At Sydney Town Hall, Aboriginal leaders and allies gathered, naming injustice plainly, launching a petition that would take ten more years to bear fruit in the 1967 referendum.

That same year, Albert Namatjira was granted citizenship—finally permitted to vote, to own property, to be legally recognised as belonging to the country whose landscapes he had already rendered with such care. You carried both the weight of exclusion and the fragile beginnings of change.

And you were on the move. Ships arrived from Britain under the promise of ten pounds and a better life. These migration schemes tried to calm anxieties about waves of non-British European migrants entering Australia. Fear and generosity travelled together, shaping streets and suburbs I would later walk through without knowing their origins.

I did not know you then. I could not read your novels, hear your debates, or grasp your contradictions. But you handed me an inheritance: unfinished architecture, contested belonging, a belief in education, a country still learning how to tell the truth about itself.

I have spent much of my life walking back into the rooms you were building—classrooms, institutions, stories—trying to steward what you began, aware that you got some things beautifully right, and others painfully wrong.

Still, you made space.
And into that space, I was born.