My grandma died yesterday, aged ninety-two years and a
few weeks (her birthday was back in late June) and it got me thinking about all
the things she’d experienced during her lifetime. When you consider the drastic
changes that have happened in the world, you could easily make a case that
people born in the twenties, like Grandma was, have gone through more
generational change than just about any other generation in history.
Born into the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties, with
the Great War behind them, but still touching most lives, with few families
around who hadn’t lost a loved one in Gallipoli, the Middle East or the Western
Front. Then the tough days of the Great Depression, which must have then paled
into insignificance in comparison to the horrors of the Second World War, which
touched Australian shores, with the bombing of Darwin and the incursion of
midget submarines into Sydney Harbour.
It’s unfathomable to think that the start of the Second
World War came less than two years after the end of the first war, which was
supposed to have taught everyone a lesson about modern warfare never to be
repeated. Families who had lost fathers, uncles and husbands were then forced to
watch another generation of men go to war – sons, nephews and cousins – and, in
many cases, not return. The Japanese threat was very real just to Australia’s
north. Men and women were drafted into some form of military service in
1939-45.
So those 1920s babies got through the Depression and the
Second World War, and were witnesses to shocking new technology like the atomic
bomb, and another conflict in Korea, too. Then there’s the giant leaps forward
in motor vehicle and aeroplane technology, replacing trains and old-fashioned
horseback riding. Telephones and radios became commonplace.
Computers didn’t exist, coming along in the seventies and
eighties, amidst the spectre of the Cold War and the threat of mutually assured
destruction, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Berlin War. Television debuted,
which must have been an incredible thing compared to radio and books. So, too,
the idea of sitting down to a computer and using it to quickly source any sort
of information. Then there was the advent of mobile phones, and now
smartphones. We take all this technology for granted, but imagine what it must
have been like adjusting to so much technological change so quickly. Medically,
we’ve come on in leaps and bounds. Easily treatable ailments were once
life-threatening.
The Vietnam War came, and it was the first conflict where
there was open hostility on the Home Front, with all sorts of protests against
Australia’s presence in what many believed was essentially a civil war – which,
of course, it was, but it was communism vs. democracy and communism was a big
thing at that time.
Other events like the September 11 attacks, the Bali
bombing, the Sydney Olympics, Gough Whitlam’s dismissal, the Kennedy
assassination have come and gone, shaping and impacting the world. Australians
fought in two Gulf Wars, went through the Global Financial Crisis like the rest
of the world, and live in the shadow of the threat of terrorism.
When you cast your mind back over all the world-shaping
events in the last ninety years, people born in the twenties (and even earlier)
have gone from almost zero technology – I mean, even primitive cars were a
rarity when grandma was a youngster – to the current day, when there isn’t one
damn thing you can’t do on a smartphone or some sort of
keyboard/keypad-operated equipment. What’s second nature to those of us who’ve
grown up with this technology was something they had to learn from scratch, and
with very few people to tell you how to do things.
The changes have been mind-boggling. It’s a wonder anyone
from that generation was able to keep up!
No comments:
Post a Comment