1984

I've been reflective lately, and happily so. A couple of months ago I was among the first to be contacted by three women organising a reunion for our year at high school. It seemed like such a big job, so I duly offered to help. Immediately I wondered if I'd regret it, as I so often seem to when I make these offers. In fact it's been wonderful.

Over the past couple of months I've heard from people I'd not seen or even thought of for decades. The truly amazing thing is that they remember me. I always assume -- or perhaps hope -- that people won't.

One friend I heard from was amazed I'd tracked him down all the way to Trinity College, Dublin. The way he wrote it you'd think I'll physically tracked him across the globe following the trail of broken twigs and fibres snagged on fences. But despite the fact it wasn't me who found him at all, but another friend of ours, it isn't actually that great a feat. Trinity College is one of the the most famous universities there are, and we now have this remarkable thing called the internet. Being an academic perhaps he's not heard of it. I searched for him myself later, too lazy to look for the email containing the link, and he came up on the first page of Google results.

Another long-lost classmate got me thinking when, commenting on our year 10 photograph, he said, "Look at us - heads full of hair and the world at our feet."* My hair hasn't taken leave, but it's an interesting thought to reflect on. We do take changes like mobile phones and the internet for granted, but if those 15 year-olds in that photo had been shown these things in 1984 we would have been apoplectic with astonishment. We were told it was going to be all jet-packs and nuclear winter. And so much leisure time due to computers and robots taking over the lion's share of our labour that the industry of "leisure management" was where the smart folk were heading. (Seriously. I recall one of our Phys. Ed. teachers telling us this repeatedly, trying to urge us into this economic liferaft.)

Robot slave. On the left, a tin man.

Instead, life is quite ordinary; I don't go in a hover car to my two-hour-per-week job supervising robot slaves, nor do I have antennae implanted in my head. But the ordinariness of my world in the ordinary suburbs diverts attention from just how fantastic and "futuristic" it all is. As I sit in the bus writing this, most other passengers have MP3 players plugged into their ears. When I was at school everyone was excited about their Walkman, a portable cassette player about the size of a boot, that chewed through batteries like billy-o. MP3 players fit in a matchbox, carry hundreds of songs and can be plugged into the mains to recharge. Can you imagine being shown one 25 years ago? Or a laptop computer? For starters, it has colours on the screen! And for eveyone except our household, they boot up on under half an hour, and without cassette tapes! Even some of the fabrics we wear today would be foreign and wonderful to my 15 year old self.

A Walkman, like the makeup, turned up too loud.

But is it a better world? I think so. Today we are more accepting of people who aren't white, straight, able-bodied males. We are generally more self-aware, so we have more opportunity to develop ourselves and live happier and fuller lives. While I think we are polluting more, we are aware enough of that that big polluters like industry are beginning to be pulled into line. And in Queensland, we are blessed with a social and political world that is infinitely more kind than it was in the mid-Eighties.



About six months ago I dreamed that my current self woke up one morning in the body and life of my high school self. I was very grateful to wake up for real. As sentimental as this reunion business has made me recently, I would struggle terribly in 1984.


*It always seems to be about the hair when looking at old photographs. Women: Look at my hideous hair! Men: Look at all my beautiful hair!