Australian Historical Studies

ISSN: 1031-461X (Print) 1940-5049 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rahs20

Australian Generations? Memory, Oral History and

Generational Identity in Postwar Australia

Professor Alistair Thomson

To cite this article: Professor Alistair Thomson (2016) Australian Generations? Memory, Oral
History and Generational Identity in Postwar Australia, Australian Historical Studies, 47:1,
41-57, DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2015.1120335

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2015.1120335

Published online: 09 Mar 2016.

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 Australian Generations? Memory, Oral History
and Generational Identity in Postwar Australia

ALISTAIR THOMSON

Australian media pundits and popular sociologists write blithely about generations such as
the Baby Boomers and Gen X, but what they are really writing about are birth cohorts who
share some common life experiences and attitudes but do not necessarily share a generational
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identity. Drawing upon oral history interviews conducted with 300 Australians, this article
argues that while a birth cohort may share historical reference points, it will not necessarily
be conscious of itself as a distinctive generation. Generations are forged by dramatic shared
experiences and emergent generational awareness in youth. Generational self-consciousness
is then fashioned and consolidated in memory by individuals who draw upon collective
representations of generational identity in making sense of their lives. This article argues that
in post-Second World War Australia there has, thus far, been only one such generation, the
so-called ‘60s generation’, and illuminates that argument though a life history case study
that also highlights the significance of gender and intergenerational relations.

Intergenerational report prepared by Baby Boomers who had the best deal
of any generation.
(Nicholas Reece, Melbourne Age, 5 March 2015)
Many ingredients make this gen Y cocktail of violence.
(Mark McCrindle, Melbourne Age, 5 February 2011)

‘Generation’ in popular discourse and sociological debate

IN AUSTRALIA TODAY media pundits and popular sociologists assert that a defining
feature of contemporary life is the coexistence of, and conflict between, gener-
ations; groups of people who are ‘born in the same era, shaped by the same
times and influenced by the same social markers—in other words [ … ] united
by age and life stage, conditions and technology, events and experiences’.1 For
example, Mark McCrindle’s 2009 book The ABC of XYZ identifies six Australian
generations: the Federation Generation (born 1901–24), Builders (1925–46),

For background on the Australian Generations Oral History Project and the articles in this issue please
see the free-to-access editorial in this issue, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2016.1119778
For invaluable comments on drafts of this article, thanks to members of the Australian Generations
team, to our Melbourne Life Writers Group, to Monash research group colleagues, and to Janet Davey.
1
Mark McCrindle with Emily Wolfinger, The ABC of XYZ: Understanding the Global Generations
(Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009), 2–3.

41
 42 Australian Historical Studies, 47, 2016

Baby Boomers (1947–64), Generation X (1965–79), Generation Y (1980–94) and

Generation Z (1995–2009).
Sociologists debate what constitutes a generation, the nature and extent of
conflict between generations, and the usefulness of ‘generation’ as an explana-
tory concept.2 As Jane Elliott notes, citing Bryan Turner, ‘the concept of gener-
ation is profoundly sociological, in that it encapsulates “the interaction between
historical resources, contingent circumstances, and social formation”’.3 Some
sociologists argue that in recent years generations have become more significant
than other social relations and identifications such as gender, ethnicity and
especially social class. McCrindle concludes that ‘the generations are the most
self-evident divisions in our society today’ and generational conflict has replaced
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class conflict at the core of social relations.4 Memory studies theorist Wulf Kan-
steiner notes, however, that as a ‘master trope of the twentieth century’, gener-
ation ‘appears all the more natural and innocent because it has never been
involved in the kinds of withering, divisive battles’ that have characterised the
intellectual history of categories such as class, race and gender.5
Part of the problem, acknowledged by many theorists, is confusion and
overlap between three definitions of generation: as successive family generations;
as members of a birth cohort; or as a birth cohort with a self-conscious genera-
tional identity.6 My focus here is on birth cohorts, though we will see how the
generational identity of a birth cohort might be shaped by the intimate tensions
of family generations. Several Australian studies have examined birth cohorts
and identified how distinctive historical circumstances have forged divergent pol-
itical attitudes. For example, in their study of ‘ordinary people’s politics’, Judith
Brett and Anthony Moran explain that,
someone born in 1928 will have experienced the 1980s very differently
from someone born in 1968, both because of the different needs and inter-
ests of a sixty-year-old compared with a twenty-year-old, but also because
of the knowledge that had built from the sixty years through which they
had lived.7

2
For a recent review of sociological debates, see Jane Elliott, ‘Talkin’ “Bout My Generation”: Percep-
tions of Generational Belonging Among the 1958 Cohort’, Sociological Research Online 18, no. 4
(2013). www.socresonline.org.uk/18/4/13.html (accessed 27 April 2015).
3
Elliott, section 1.1, citing B. S. Turner, ‘Strategic Generations: Historical Change, Literary
Expression, and Generational Politics’, in Generational Consciousness, Narrative and Politics, eds June
Edmunds and Bryan S. Turner (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002), 16.
4
McCrindle, 24. See also, N. Corsten, ‘The Time of Generations’, Time and Society 8, no. 2 (1999):
249–72.
5
Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Moral Pitfalls of Memory Studies: The Concept of Political Generations’, Memory
Studies 5, no. 2 (2012): 211. See also Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Generation and Memory: A Critique of the
Ethical and Ideological Implications of Generational Narration’, in Writing the History of Memory, eds
Stefan Berger and Bill Niven (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 111–34.
6
See Elliott, section 1.6; S. Biggs, ‘Thinking about Generations: Conceptual Positions and Policy
Implications’, Journal of Social Issues 63, no. 4 (2007): 695–711.
7
Judith Brett and Anthony Moran, Ordinary People’s Politics: Australians Talk about Life, Politics, and the
Future of Their Country (Melbourne: Pluto Press Australia, 2006), 8. See also Hugh Mackay, Gener-
ations: Baby Boomers, Their Parents and Their Children (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1997).
 Thomson: Memory, Oral History and Generational Identity in Postwar Australia 43

Studies like this begin to explain how and why birth cohorts might develop distinc-
tive attitudes, yet do not examine the historical factors that might forge a self-con-
scious and assertive generational identity for some birth cohorts but not others.

Historians and generations

Historians, too, often deploy generation when they mean birth cohort, and ill-
defined usage leads to extravagant claims. For example, Strauss and Howe’s
book, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069, tracks American
generations in fifteen- to twenty-year bands back to the Puritan founders and
argues for the centrality of generations in American history.8 European studies
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are sometimes more subtle, especially on the generational significance of twenti-

eth-century wars. This work has pointed to useful ways of conceptualising and
deploying the notion of ‘generation’ in historical analysis.
Robert Wohl’s pioneering book, The Generation of 1914, published in 1979, is
one of the more impressive and influential generational histories. Wohl interro-
gates the myth of the generation of 1914, rather than taking such a phenomenon
for granted. He argues that the notion of a new generation facing new times, the
‘youth of today’, was articulated in the years before the First World War by the cul-
tural elite of several European countries. This generational awareness was ‘a
reflection of the atmosphere of novelty created by technological change, shifts
in the structure of society, the threat of a general European war, and the appear-
ance of a new culture’. The historical circumstances of the turn of the century,
rather than the war itself, were the catalyst for an emerging generational self-con-
sciousness. Yet Wohl then shows how the war experience was extraordinary and
formative for that cultural elite, most of whom served as junior officers and were
shaped by the trench war of attrition, by wartime bonds and hopes, and then by
postwar disillusionment. During and after the war they articulated their shattered
lives and ideals in generational terms. As Wohl writes, the young were slaugh-
tered in a war directed by the old, so that ‘[t]he front taught an unforgettable
lesson in generationalism to those who came to know it’.9
Wohl’s work highlights the value of historical specificity about generational
formation. Wohl was influenced by German sociologist Karl Mannheim, whose
1927 essay, ‘The problem of generations’, was informed by his attempt to under-
stand the First World War’s extraordinary impact on the ‘1914 generation’. Man-
nheim conceptualised generation as ‘a social creation rather than a biological
necessity’ and argued persuasively that a generation must be formed and not
simply born.10 His approach influenced Wohl and more recent generation
theorists such as June Edmunds and Bryan Turner, who write about the

8
William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York:
Quill, 1991). Strauss and Howe draw on ‘generational determinists’ like Spanish historian Julián
Mariás, author of Generations: A Historical Method (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1970).
9
Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 222.
10
Karl Mannheim, ‘The Problem of Generations’, in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecs-
kemeti (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), 309 (originally published in Germany in 1927).
 44 Australian Historical Studies, 47, 2016

formation of the 1960s generation in their 2002 book, Generations, Culture and
Society.11 The next section synthesises key points about generations which were
signalled by Mannheim and have been developed by later theorists.

Towards a generational theory

First, a generation, as distinct from a birth cohort, is forged by the shared experi-
ence of profound and destabilising events. Mannheim wrote of the importance of
a ‘process of dynamic destabilisation’, and Edmunds and Turner explained that ‘a
generation can be defined in terms of a collective response to a traumatic event
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that unites a particular cohort of individuals into a self-conscious age

stratum’.12 Historical circumstances such as war, social revolution, economic cat-
astrophe or natural disaster might have an impact in these terms, both as a pro-
found (though not necessarily ‘traumatic’) shared experience but also, crucially,
through the articulation of that experience in generational terms. Conversely, not
every birth cohort experiences such dramatic, formative events, and a genera-
tional consciousness might not be formed in periods without such profound,
defining events.13 Such birth cohorts are defined by some theorists as ‘passive
generations’.14
Most generation theorists also agree that generations are created in the for-
mative years of youth, that profound, destabilising events have their strongest,
lifelong impact on young people whose attitudes and identifications are forged
by their experience of such events.15 Memory theorists contribute to this aspect
of generation theory by highlighting the importance of subsequent remembering
of formative youthful experiences. The formation of generational consciousness
is not just about the initial creation and performance of vivid self-representations
in youth, but is also about their significance in subsequent remembering. Indeed,
the significance of formative early experiences may be accentuated by the process
of life review and remembering in later life.16
The achievement of a generational consciousness through the articulation of
shared experiences in youth and their remembering in later life doesn’t happen in
an individual vacuum. Individual generational consciousness contributes to and,
crucially, is shaped by collective representations of the past. The formation of a

11
June Edmunds and Bryan S. Turner, Generations, Culture and Society (Buckingham: Open University
Press, 2002). See also Edmunds and Turner, Generational Consciousness, Narrative and Politics.
12
Edmunds and Turner, Generations, Culture and Society, 12; Mannheim, 319.
13
Howard Schuman and Jacqueline Scott, ‘Generations and Collective Memories’, American Sociologi-
cal Review 54, no. 3 (1989): 359–81.
14
Elliott, section 1.2; Turner, ‘Strategic Generations’, 13–14.
15
For debate about why youth constitutes a critical period for the formation of generations, see
Schuman and Scott, ‘Generations and Collective Memories’; Martin A. Conway, ‘The Inventory
of Experience: Memory and Identity’, in Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Per-
spectives, eds James Pennebaker, Dario Paez and Bernard Rimé (Mahwah, NJ: Psychology Press,
1997), 40; Howard Schuman, Robert F. Belli and Katherine Bischoping, ‘The Generational Basis
of Historical Knowledge’, in Pennebaker et al., 71–5.
16
Conway, 40–3.
 Thomson: Memory, Oral History and Generational Identity in Postwar Australia 45

generation requires that it be collectively recognised and articulated at the time of

its inception, in the attitudes, practices and ways of being of a self-conscious gen-
eration, and in how it is defined by others—most frequently, by the ‘older gener-
ation’. Over time, an active generational consciousness is sustained by a cohort
that continues to define and remember itself as a distinctive generation, and to
be represented as such in the wider culture. As Edmunds and Turner conclude,
‘Generations are therefore constructed through the institutionalisation of
memory through collective rituals and narratives’.17 Many studies of historical
generations focus on how a generation represents itself, and is represented by
others, from the time of initial articulation through to consolidation in a range
of representative practices, such as autobiography and fiction, fashion and
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song, political rhetoric or oral tradition. Most studies also focus, like Wohl or
Edmunds and Turner, on a social elite who see themselves as the vanguard of
a new generation, and who have the cultural power to ensure their collective
self-definition takes hold in popular discourse.

Oral history and Australian generations

With its usual emphasis on non-elite experience, oral history offers one way to
investigate generational formation across a wider social spectrum. Several fine
studies have used oral history to show if and how significant shared experiences
are forged into generational consciousness, and how such a consciousness is then
sustained—or not—in individual remembering and reinforced by collective rep-
resentations of a generation. Luisa Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation
(1988) and Robert Gildea, James Mark and Anette Warring’s Europe 1968:
Voices of Revolt (2013) used interviews to document the European activist gener-
ation of 1968.18 In the United States Michael Frisch and others have explored
how a generational memory of ‘Hard Times’ in the Great Depression was sus-
tained through a complex interaction between remembered experience and cul-
tural representation.19
In Australia, too, it is quite clear from work such as Janet McCalman’s oral
histories of Melbournites who grew up between the wars, that the economic
Depression of the early 1930s had a profound effect on people who came of
age between the wars.20 I’ve written elsewhere about how the ‘Depression

17
Edmunds and Turner, Generations, Culture and Society, 11.
18
Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968, first published in Italy in 1988, translated
from Italian by Lisa Erdberg (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1996); Robert Gildea, James
Mark and Anette Warring, Europe 1968: Voices of Revolt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
See also Joseph Maslen, ‘Autobiographies of a Generation? Carolyn Steedman, Luisa Passerini
and the Memory of 1968’, Memory Studies 6, no. 1 (2013): 23–36.
19
Michael Frisch, ‘Oral History and Hard Times’, Oral History Review 7 (1979): 70–9. See also, Donald
J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2012).
20
Janet McCalman, Journeyings: The Biography of a Middle-Class Generation 1920–1990 (Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press, 1993); Janet McCalman, Struggletown, Public and Private Life in
 46 Australian Historical Studies, 47, 2016

generation’ looms large in the ‘Australia 1938’ oral history project interviews
conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s with Australians born between the
late 1890s and 1930.21 The 1930s Depression is now almost beyond living
memory, and among our interviews for the Australian Generations Oral
History Project, conducted between 2011 and 2014, there are just a few with
people born in the 1920s who define themselves as part of that Depression gen-
eration. Our interviews are more revealing about postwar Australian birth
cohorts.
The Australian Generations project collected 1,221 hours of recordings
with 300 interviewees (about fifty born in each decade from the 1930s to
the 1980s, with a sprinkling born in the 1920s).22 The editorial of this issue
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of Australian Historical Studies explains in more detail the selection and creation
of these interviews, and concludes that although no oral history archive pro-
vides a fully representative sample (given only willing subjects are inter-
viewed), this collection does comprise a diverse range of Australian
experience—in terms of age, gender, social class, country of birth and ethni-
city, and region—and is large enough to support suggestive generalisations.
The final section of each life history interview focused on questions about gen-
eration, and the following conclusions are based on a review of this section of
the interviews.
One very strong impression from our interviews is that many people, of
certain age groups, just don’t identify themselves in generational terms at all.
Though they shared some memorable experiences, such as the music they
enjoyed in their youth, ‘generation’ is not a significant collective identity. This
lack of a generational identity is most obvious for those born between about
the late 1950s and the late 1970s, the people who might stereotypically be
labelled as late Baby Boomers or Generation X. For example, Ann Davie, born
in 1961, says that the generation questions towards the end of the interview
did not resonate with her because she does not see herself as part of a particular
generation. David Cooper, born in 1959, defines his own generation mostly by
comparison with that of his children, born in the 1980s, who do not have the
racism he grew up with in the 1960s. Bronwyn McLoughlin (born 1967), Suzie
Quartermain (born 1975) and Phoebe Parisia (born 1978) do not identify with
Generation X or Y and describe themselves as ‘between generations’ or a

Richmond, 1900–1965 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1984). See also Chilla Bulbeck,
Living Feminism: The Impact of the Women’s Movement on Three Generations of Australian Women (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
21
Alistair Thomson, ‘Australian Generations? Transformative Events, Memory and Generational
Identity’, in Conflicted Pasts and National Identities: Narratives of War and Conflict, ed. Michael Boss
(Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2014), 55–68; Alistair Thomson, ‘Biography of an Archive: “Aus-
tralia 1938” and the Vexed Development of Australian Oral History’, Australian Historical Studies 45,
no. 3 (2014): 425–49.
22
On project methodology, see Alistair Thomson, ‘Innovation or Revolution in Digital Aural History:
An Australian Case Study’, Oral History Review (in press, 2016); and the article in this issue by Kevin
Bradley and Anisa Puri, ‘Creating an Oral History Archive: Digital Opportunities and Ethical Issues’,
Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 1 (2016), doi:10.1080/1031461X.2015.1122072.
 Thomson: Memory, Oral History and Generational Identity in Postwar Australia 47

‘forgotten generation’.23 Most members of the Australian birth cohorts born

between the late 1950s and the late 1970s do not have a significant generational
identity. This Australian finding matches recent British interviews with a large
sample of participants in the 1958 British Birth Cohort Study, which concluded
that the majority ‘did not have a strong generational identity and might be
thought of as a “passive generation”’.24
Australia’s postwar immigrants do, however, identify themselves in distinc-
tive generational terms. They may identify superficially as members of the
‘postwar generation’, and perhaps as Baby Boomers, but the more important col-
lective identity of migrants like Irene Schultz, who left Germany for Australia
with her family soon after birth in 1945, is as a member of the postwar
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migrant generation. Children of the postwar migrants, such as Shannon

Murphy (Sydney born in 1967 to an Irish mother) and Clare Atkins (Sydney
born in 1980 to a Vietnamese father), also identify strongly as ‘second-gener-
ation’ migrants. Their use of the term ‘generation’ is multivalent, signifying
both successive generations within an extended migrant family but also the foun-
dational importance within family story-telling and identity of that first postwar
migrant generation. For postwar migrants there is a strong interconnection
between family and social articulations of generation.25 Country of birth and cul-
tural background clearly impact on generational identity, and future research
might consider the generational effects of migration and ethnicity.
One group which does see itself as distinctive and which might, in time, identify
as a generation, comprises our youngest interviewees born in the 1980s. These
young men and women understand their lives, and their birth cohort, to be differ-
ent in two ways. First, they have a strong sense of themselves as the first digital
natives, who have grown up with computers and then the internet entangled in
their everyday lives and shaping work, play, communications and relationships.
Paul Potter (Sydney born in 1981 and now an aeronautical engineer) narrates a
life ‘drip fed’ on digital technology, and Leah Ashley (Newcastle born in 1982)
explains that meeting her Scottish-Fijian husband through the internet is just
one example of the importance of new technologies and social media for people
of her age.26 Second, this birth cohort identifies ‘9/11’—signifying both the destruc-
tion of the Twin Towers and its violent global aftermath—as a key historical juncture
in their lives. They reflect on how they grew up at a time of dramatic change
initiated and symbolised by 9/11. The destruction of the Twin Towers serves as a
shared ‘flashbulb’ memory generated by the striking visual and sensory impact of

23
All subsequent interview references are from the Australian Generations collection at the National
Library of Australia (pseudonyms are used where interviews are not yet available for public access
or cannot be identified): Ann Davie, TRC 6300/44; David Cooper, TRC 6300/160; Bronwyn
McLoughlin, TRC 6300/47; Suzie Quartermain, TRC 6300/169; Phoebe Parisia, TRC 6300/101.
24
Elliott, Abstract.
25
Irene Schultz (pseudonym); Shannon Murphy (pseudonym); Clare Atkins, TRC 6300/123. Further
research might also highlight specific postwar generational identities for Aboriginal Australians and
for gay men and lesbians (see, for example, Donald Grey-Smith, TRC 6300/241).
26
Paul Potter (pseudonym); Leah Ashley, TRC 6300/79.
 48 Australian Historical Studies, 47, 2016

contemporary television and internet images. The events had a potent but inchoate
impact at a formative age, and now contribute to an emerging sense that this was a
time when childhood certainties were pulled apart and they realised—perhaps at
the time but certainly over time—that their world would never again be the
same. In the 2010s these young adult interviewees are only just beginning to
narrate their life stories in generational terms, but perhaps in 2040 when they
look back and see how their own lives and attitudes, and the wider society, were
transformed by 9/11 and its aftermath—and as that event is consolidated in collec-
tive remembrance—they may think of themselves not as Gen X or Gen Y but rather
as the ‘9/11 Generation’ or perhaps the ‘internet generation’.27
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The ‘60s generation’

Across our 300 interviewees the only postwar age cohort which currently identifies
strongly in terms of a common generational identity is the early Baby Boomers, born
between the mid-1940s and the late 1950s. It is not the timing of their birth that sets
this group apart but rather their coming of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
More than any other postwar Australian birth cohort, this group was shaped by dra-
matic social and cultural changes in its formative years. In the late 1960s and early
1970s they recognised themselves—and were represented by others—as a distinc-
tive generation, and in hindsight that identity has been consolidated by deep-
rooted collective historical representations of the ‘60s generation’ (the 70s are
usually left off the generational label, though it’s clear the early 1970s, with the
reforms of a federal Labor government and the growth of second-wave feminism
and other activist movements, are also important years for this formative genera-
tional experience). For Sue Beeton (born in Melbourne in 1956) and Gwen
Waters (born in 1954 to a German-Australian family in South Australia) the
protest movements they watched on television as teenagers and then joined as
young adults were formative. While these identities were often forged in fraught
intergenerational relationships with parents who had grown up in a very different
era, they were also consolidated by the subsequent impressions of their own chil-
dren, born in the 1970s and 1980s. Thus Alyce Schlothauer (Sydney born in
1987) emphasises the 1970s counter-culture of her parents and all it stood for in
terms of politics, fashion, culture and change. She wishes she was part of a time
when it seemed that change was so real and anything was possible.28
This 60s generational identity has distinctive gender features; indeed amongst
our interviewees it seems to be more prevalent, and more potent, for women born

27
See Jonathon Zilber, TRC 6300/78, and Adam Farrow-Palmer, TRC 6300/136 (climate change may
also become a significant element of this generational identity). International studies have also
noted that ‘a “new” generation may be emerging as a result of 9/11’ and debated the impacts on
today’s young adults of globalisation and changed economic circumstances: Alan France and
Steven Roberts, ‘The Problem of Social Generations: A Critique of the New Emerging Orthodoxy
in Youth Studies’, Journal of Youth Studies 18, no. 2 (2015): 215–30.
28
Sue Beeton, TRC 6300/06; Gwen Waters, TRC 6300/152; Alyce Schlothauer, TRC 6300/174.
 Thomson: Memory, Oral History and Generational Identity in Postwar Australia 49

in the 1940s and 1950s, for whom the transformations of the late 1960s and
1970s had a particular impact on their opportunities and trajectories as young
women and whose life story was often framed, at the time and over time, by fem-
inism. Women such as Veronica Schwartz (Brisbane born in 1939), Rosemary
Walker (Sydney born in 1941) and Josephine Sanaghan-Cross (Scottish born
in 1951 and brought up in ‘very rough’ northern Melbourne housing commission
estates) started conventional marriages in the 1960s, ended them thanks to no-
fault divorce in the 1970s, and used free university study for mature students
as a springboard into professional careers or greater freedom and travel. They
credit the legislative reforms of Gough Whitlam’s 1972–75 government for chan-
ging their lives, and they recognise how the most profound changes—by com-
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parison with their mothers’ and their own earlier lives—related to

opportunities for women.29 This is also a generation shaped by new opportunities
for social mobility, and from our interviews it seems that the 60s generation iden-
tity is especially strong amongst both women and men whose life choices were
transformed in this period and who benefited from these opportunities.
Though it’s possible to locate and explore generational patterns like this
across the sample of Australian Generations interviews, some of the richest inter-
pretative opportunities in oral history are offered by the single life history case
study. By drilling down into the detail of one interview and examining the inter-
connections between experience and subjectivity across the life course, and often
across a longer family history, we can illuminate the complex intersections of per-
sonal history and social context, and how the ‘horizon of possibilities’ offered by
particular times and places shaped generational identities. We can also see how
generational identities are articulated through individual remembering yet
framed by collective memories and identities.30
Janet Davey, born in Melbourne in 1954, commenced her Expression of
Interest for being interviewed by our project by introducing herself as ‘a typical
example of a woman who has taken and run with the opportunities of my
“times”’, and concluded that ‘I do believe I am a pretty typical example of a
woman born in the Baby Boomer years and young in the Sixties and Seventies’.31
The following case study explores the personal and historical factors that shaped
this ‘typical’ experience and forged Janet’s distinctive generational identity. My
interpretative method examines the explicit storylines of Janet’s narrative,
noting the emphases and explanations that construct a coherent identity and
how she draws upon shared cultural narratives, especially the story of her

29
Veronica Schwartz, TRC 6300/161; Rosemary Walker (pseudonym); Josephine Sanaghan-Cross,
TRC 6300/131. On the distinctive patterns of women’s generational experience and identity, see
Bulbeck, 19–22; Katie Barclay, Rosalind Carr, Rose Elliot and Annmarie Hughes, ‘Introduction:
Gender and Generations: Women and Life Cycles’, Women’s History Review 20, no. 2 (2011): 175–88.
30
On ‘the horizon of possibilities’ see Alessandro Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia (Madison: Univer-
sity of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 276.
31
Janet Davey, interviewed by Cath McLennan in Drouin, Gippsland, Victoria on 7, 9 and 10 May
2012, TRC 6300/66. Many thanks to Janet Davey for her thoughtful and generous comments on
drafts of this article.
 50 Australian Historical Studies, 47, 2016

generation. I also ‘listen in stereo’ for experiences that are muted beneath that
cultural script and which complicate the life story.32 Here I am indebted to the
interview Janet conducted with interviewer Cath McLennan. Both parties
probed beyond the surface story of Janet’s Expression of Interest and explored
the jagged edges of Janet’s story. Janet’s reflective insight continued as she
read this draft, corrected errors and added further explanation. In places we
deleted details that might upset others but whose absence did not invalidate
the conclusions. Anonymity was not an option, given I hoped readers would
listen to interview extracts, and this ‘sharing of authority’ (a much-debated prac-
tice within oral history scholarship) was necessary, and, on balance, enhanced the
conclusions.33
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Janet’s parents’ approach to life and work—which would be fundamental in

Janet’s upbringing and intergenerational rebellion—was moulded by the econ-
omic difficulties and aspirations of their early lives. Her father Edward Davey,
born in 1925 and brought up in working-class Richmond, was from a family of
builders who lost money in the Depression. Edward won a coveted place at
state selective Melbourne High School but his dream of further study was
thwarted because the family could not afford university fees. He left school to
work in a drafting office, though continued his studies at evening classes.
Janet’s mother Edna also regretted missed educational opportunities, though in
her case the problem was both financial and the fact she was a girl. Her father
was a butcher who had lost businesses in the Depression, and she did what
was expected of a daughter and left school at thirteen to start work.
Janet’s perception is that her parents were driven by the frustration of their
educational aspirations, by different degrees of childhood hardship and frugality,
and by their determination to leave behind working-class inner suburbs like Rich-
mond, where they met: ‘They wanted to have their own home, they wanted to
have a better life than what their parents had had before them. They were
both very affected by the Depression’.34 When Janet was young her father com-
bined a day job as a draftsman with an early morning milk delivery round, and on
the weekends he helped Edna with the catering business she had established
before they were married using start-up funds from her father. Both parents
worked all week and ‘a 24-hour Saturday’ as they saved to build their new
family home in leafy Box Hill on the fringe of Melbourne’s eastward suburban
sprawl. Janet recalls that by the late 1950s they ‘became the typical Australian
family’, with a dog and two children (Janet and her older sister, Deanne, born

32
Kathryn Anderson and Dana C. Jack, ‘Learning to Listen: Interview Techniques and Analysis’, in
Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, eds Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai
(London: Routledge, 1991), 11–26.
33
Alistair Thomson, ‘Moving Stories, Women’s Lives: Sharing Authority in Oral History’, Oral History
39, no. 2 (2011): 73–82
34
Davey interview, session 1, 00:14:11, at http://www.nla.gov.au/amad/nla.oh-vn6252057/0-793~
0-864. Note that this and other urls from the Davey interview refer to the segment of the interview
within which the quote is located. If you click on the link in the online version of this article you can
listen to that segment.
 Thomson: Memory, Oral History and Generational Identity in Postwar Australia 51

in 1948), a home in the suburbs, a car and a caravan for school holidays. By the
mid-1960s Edward had worked his way up to an engineering and research job
with CSIRO. Edna was a tireless homemaker, determined to ‘keep up appear-
ances’ by sewing curtains, lampshades and ball gowns, as well as hosting
regular social events in the family home:
She just looked so gorgeous. I can remember her with her hair up in a
French roll and she looked so professional and so well-groomed … if
you’ve seen ‘Madmen’ … this was my childhood. There it was. Here’s the
mother all dressed up and she’s got the apron on, and all the bits and
pieces of the mod cons.35
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In other ways, the family was not so stereotypical. Edna now worked in retail
outside the home, and to get ahead she and Edward teamed up with his brothers
in a home renovation company. Both parents worked and played hard, and Edna
began to drink too much.
From the start, Janet’s emerging generational identity was forged through
conflict with her parents, and especially her mother, over different expectations
for young women.
I think in some ways I wasn’t particularly easy because I was a bit of a ques-
tioner. I’ve always been a thinker. And certainly when I got to adolescence I
was developing a set of parameters that didn’t fit in with the value system
that my mother had. She had to accept an awful lot of change dealing with
me … I rebelled a lot.36
Janet identifies starting secondary school in 1967 as the beginning of this rebel-
lion. Her aspirational parents did not trust the new high schools around Box
Hill and decided to send Janet to the same private girls’ school in Kew Edna
had wanted to attend as a child. Janet gravitated to the rebellious students,
perhaps because her home life was settled but dull, with her father often away
for work, her big sister in the workforce and Edna now at a full-time job in a
shoe boutique, ‘or maybe because of the times, that was in 1967 and things
were starting to change, and I was aware that there was change’.37
Appearance was the first and continuing flashpoint. Janet’s mother ‘was
always impeccably groomed and everything had to match’; ‘you never went any-
where without your coat, your hat and your gloves’. Janet was overweight and
buying clothes was difficult because most women’s shops didn’t stock big sizes
(except for the department store Myer, which was too conservative for Janet).
Edna was a skilled seamstress and created smart outfits that Janet refused to
wear; she would ‘sew me up a little “slack suit” that would have suited

35
Davey interview, session 1, 01:37:02, at http://www.nla.gov.au/amad/nla.oh-vn6252057/0-5822~
0-6010.
36
Davey interview, session 1, 01:10:46, at http://www.nla.gov.au/amad/nla.oh-vn6252057/0-4246~
0-4294.
37
Davey interview, session 1, 01:14:07; 01:15:16, at http://www.nla.gov.au/amad/nla.oh-
vn6252057/0-4516~0-4561; 01:17:22.
 52 Australian Historical Studies, 47, 2016

someone who was fifty’. Janet’s refusal to curl her hair was another ‘source of
constant conflict [ … ] you went to bed in rollers and you curled your hair’. By
the time she was thirteen Janet was ‘insisting on wearing a red kilt with long
black socks and desert boots and a black sweater, so I was in my beatnik phase,
and she was horrified. Clothing was always an issue between us’. Janet recalls
that she was beginning to pick up new ideas from feminism and didn’t want to
engage in all the ‘rigmarole’ about women’s appearance and, to her mother’s
consternation, deliberately dressed casually. ‘I wasn’t willing to learn from my
mother because it was so conservative’.38 Mother and daughter tempestuously
negotiated the different kinds of femininities that were emerging and clashing
in the 1960s.39
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Edna worried that Janet’s fashion rebellion extended to sex and drugs, and
Janet led her along by ‘talking the talk’, though she was actually rather naïve
during her school years. Janet didn’t see a naked male body until her first
sexual encounter at nineteen. She knew about drugs because of media portrayals
of American psychedelic culture, and because one girl at school was allegedly
growing marijuana on the Kew campus in the early 1970s while others made
marijuana tea in the senior centre. But when Janet bought a microdot of LSD
in Year 11 she didn’t know what to do with it, carried it around on the back of
her school badge, and ended up selling it back to the dealer. It’s not surprising
that parents and teachers sometimes formed a misleading impression of brash
teenagers.40
Politics was another sticking point. Janet’s parents were supporters of the
conservative Liberal Party and Edna hoped that Janet would join the young Lib-
erals to meet a nice young man, but at school an inspirational teacher with a
strong social conscience taught Janet about socialism and communism. In
1970, she wanted to join the Vietnam Moratorium march in the city but her
father wouldn’t allow her to attend because of the threat of violence. Janet
didn’t feel she could disobey her parents and instead expressed her rebellion
through the black skivvy, desert boots and army jacket that had become her
uniform of choice.41 There were other political and cultural influences. In 1969
Janet’s sister Deanne married the man she had met at church when she was
sixteen. Deanne’s husband Graeme was a school teacher and book collector
and he encouraged Janet to read philosophical books that were not available in
her own home. Graeme also had a guitar, and aged about fifteen Janet taught
herself to play the guitar and began to strum and sing folk and protest music,
such as Barry McGuire’s American anthem ‘The Eve of Destruction’ (‘Violence
flarin’, bullets loadin’, You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’’). At school
Janet won a singing scholarship and took classical singing in Year 12. Excellent

38
Davey interview, session 1, 01:16:56, 00:20:05; 01:16:56, 01:18:40 (listen at http://www.nla.gov.
au/amad/nla.oh-vn6252057/0-4562).
39
Bulbeck, 34–44.
40
Davey interview, session 3, 00:00:00; 00:05:11 (listen at http://www.nla.gov.au/amad/nla.oh-
vn6252057/2-0); session 1, 01:23:05.
41
Davey interview, session 3, 00:22:21, at http://www.nla.gov.au/amad/nla.oh-vn6252057/2-1341.
 Thomson: Memory, Oral History and Generational Identity in Postwar Australia 53

results earned an operatic singing scholarship for the Melba Conservatorium,

which she later regretted not taking up: ‘but once again, being a little bit rebel-
lious, I was far too busy singing folk music and hanging around in coffee shops
and smoking, and doing all the things that one’s not supposed to do if one’s an
opera singer’.42 Though the main theme of Janet’s narrative is her youthful rebel-
lion, her account signals a more muted, rueful remembrance of the costs of that
cultural expectation for rebellion.
Janet summarises the years after she finished school in 1972 as pathbreaking
for her and for other women of her generation.
I was the first in my family to be educated to a tertiary level. I was also the
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first to travel overseas on my own as an unmarried woman at twenty-five.

The Whitlam Labor years allowed me free tertiary education and also access
to further education later in life.
After turning eighteen in 1972, Janet used her first vote for Labor. Offered
places in interior design at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and econ-
omics and politics at Monash University, Janet opted instead for Burwood tea-
chers’ college, with encouragement from her mother who was relieved it was
not the infamously radical Monash, and who remembered the hurdles of balan-
cing work and childcare and saw teaching as a job which might be more com-
patible with women’s role in marriage and family life. Janet had her own ideas,
and went to teachers’ college because teacher training came with a studentship
and she wanted to be economically independent. Though she lived at home for
the first two years of college, she got involved in student politics and the arty
crowd, bought a car, went out drinking with new friends and started using
marijuana.
Home life was becoming very difficult. Janet’s mother was by now a
secret alcoholic. With Deanne now living in her own home, and their father
often away for work, Janet suffered the sharp edge of her mother’s affliction.
Getting away from home was a personal priority, yet Janet now sees that it
also was a unique opportunity for a young woman at that time. Edna believed
a daughter, like Deanne, ‘stayed home until she married’, but Janet didn’t
want to ‘live in the sticks at Box Hill’ any longer and was desperate to move
out, in part because she knew Edna would not let her share a bed with a man
at home. In Janet’s mind, the opportunities and aspirations for her big sister,
born just six years earlier, were profoundly different. Deanne ‘took the more tra-
ditional and conservative path of early marriage and motherhood living as a
home maker while mothering her family and keeping house for her husband’.
By contrast Janet was a privileged member of a short-lived generation that
could afford to live independently without family support. ‘There was just one
generation, it seems to be, it [family financial support] wasn’t so important,

42
Davey interview, session 1, 01:24:12 and 01:28:20 (listen at http://www.nla.gov.au/amad/nla.oh-
vn6252057/0-5300~0-5483); ‘The Eve of Destruction’ lyrics are at http://artists.letssingit.com/
barry-mcguire-lyrics-eve-of-destruction-s1m88lj#axzz3GqO1BUKE (accessed 21 October 2014).
 54 Australian Historical Studies, 47, 2016

and it was my generation, it wasn’t my sister’s’.43 Janet’s reference to her gener-

ation is very specifically not to a Baby Boomer birth cohort, but rather to a distinc-
tive cohort that experienced independence and activism.
In 1975, her third year at college, Janet joined three other young women in a
shared house, the first of several shared houses over the next five years as she
took up teaching and education librarian jobs around Melbourne and studied
for a Graduate Diploma in Librarianship—at this point Janet did benefit from
the free higher education introduced by the Whitlam government in 1974,
though her initial tertiary studies would have been free anyway because
student teachers were subsidised. Away from home it was easier to be indepen-
dent and sexually active, and in contrast to her mother’s core value of no sex
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before marriage, ‘the pill changed everything and it was a period of enormous
upheaval, certainly in sexuality’. Janet enjoyed several relationships with men
without wanting or needing to be tied down by marriage.
I didn’t get married until I was thirty, so obviously I had a few [relationships
… ] Each different relationship seemed to take me into a different world,
and I was an explorer in my own sense. I had the freedom to explore. It
was wonderful to be able to move into different cultures and different
experiences.44
As Janet notes, ‘the pill changed everything’ and was a profound, gendered ingre-
dient of generational change. Janet was able to negotiate sexual relationships in
ways that marked a radical break from her mother’s generation.45
In 1980 Janet’s very mobile housemates inspired her to travel in Europe and
Asia for a year, with leave from the Education Department. Looking back, this
was a life turning point, a time of complete independence and increased self-con-
fidence. In Greece she discovered a love of the countryside, and back in Australia
she determined to move to the country and took up teaching work in rural Gipps-
land. She met her future husband, another teacher, in a pub in Drouin just after
she had decided to settle in the country town. Though Ashley didn’t believe in
marriage and Janet had been a ‘non-traditionalist’ all her life, they decided to
get married to make Edna happy, thus recognising and appeasing the costs felt
on both sides of intergenerational conflict. Indeed, though tensions between
mother and daughter (over appearance, politics and sex) are central in Janet’s
generational narrative, between the lines of Janet’s interview, triggered by
careful questions and reflective life review, is a more sympathetic counter-narra-
tive of a mother who was also a role model as a dynamic working woman. The

43
Davey, Expression of Interest; Davey interview, session 1, 00:13:13; session 5, 01:05:02; Davey
Expression of Interest; Davey interview, session 1, 00:58:22, at http://www.nla.gov.au/amad/
nla.oh-vn6252057/0-3502~0-3588.
44
Davey interview, session 2, 00:56:46; session 3, 00:40:48; session 2, 00:56:46, at http://www.nla.
gov.au/amad/nla.oh-vn6252057/1-3406~1-3469.
45
Katie Holmes and Sarah Pinto, ‘Gender and Sexuality’, in The Cambridge History of Australia, Volume
2, The Commonwealth of Australia, eds Alison Bashford and Stuart McIntyre (Melbourne: Cambridge
University Press, 2015), 324–5.
 Thomson: Memory, Oral History and Generational Identity in Postwar Australia 55

interview reveals the formation of a generational identity yet also complicates

intergenerational stereotypes.
Janet and Ashley had two children in the late 1980s and while the children
were young Janet took seven years out of teaching (a beneficiary of the parental
leave and superannuation benefits won by feminism). She returned to teaching
when her youngest started school, and then fought a successful battle with
cancer in the early 2000s whilst also caring for her elderly parents and an
unwell teenage daughter. These testing times prompted Janet’s decision to
retire and ‘gain a sense of freedom’ again.46
Looking back on her life, Janet has no doubt that she was fortunate to come
of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and that she was indeed a member of a
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distinctive, self-conscious generation, shaped by the turbulence of youth during a

period of dramatic change. Janet’s formative years coincided with, and were
impacted by, social transformations that created new opportunities and expec-
tations for young Australians, while also generating significant conflict with
parents whose more conservative attitudes were often shaped by their own for-
mation by Depression and war. Janet was perhaps most profoundly informed by
her gendered experience as a girl and young woman, by conflict with her
mother’s ideas about what a woman could and should be, and by new opportu-
nities available through education, economic independence and reliable contra-
ception. And her teenage sense of belonging to a distinctive generation was
informed by the generational popular culture that became part of her everyday
life (‘You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’’), and then consolidated by a
powerful collective memory about ‘the 1960s’ (the popular label which subsumes
the early 1970s) and the generation that ‘discovered’ sex, drugs and rock and roll,
enjoyed free higher education for the first time, and made the most of new ideas
and opportunities for women.

Conclusions

Media pundits write blithely about the Builders, the Baby Boomers, Gen X and
Gen Y, but what they are really writing about are birth cohorts who share
some common life experiences and attitudes but do not necessarily share a gen-
erational identity. Our Australian Generations interviews suggest that although
the Baby Boomers may have been a demographically significant birth cohort
they do not share a single generational identity. The contrast between the
shared generational identity of those born from the mid-1940s to the late
1950s who came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the lack of genera-
tional identity among Australians born from about 1960 up until the late 1970s,
confirms that generations are not simply formed by a coincidence of birth. While
a birth cohort may share historical reference points, such as a common musical

46
Davey interview, session 2, 00:53:29; session 2, 01:04:28 (quote at http://www.nla.gov.au/amad/
nla.oh-vn6252057/1-3868~1-4020); session 3, 01:04:40; session 4, 00:00:00; session 5, 00:21:19.
 56 Australian Historical Studies, 47, 2016

history, it will not necessarily have a consciousness of itself as a distinctive gener-

ation. Not all birth cohorts become generations. Generations are historically con-
tingent. They are forged by dramatic shared experiences and an emergent
generational awareness in youth. Our interviews suggest that in post-Second
World War Australian history there has, thus far, been only one such generation,
the so-called ‘60s generation’.
The youth of any era may well conflict with their parents and elders, but par-
ticular historical circumstances, such as the period leading up to and including the
First World War, or the expanding opportunities and education available to
young people in the 1960s and 1970s, may sharpen that conflict and generate
a powerful shared experience of difference and conflict which leads to the articu-
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lation of a generational identity. Yet the example of Janet Davey also highlights
the significance of intimate family relations as a primary site of generational
tension and identification, and how a layering of successive and interconnected
generational experiences can reverberate through a family history, with
Edward and Edna’s life-shaping youth in the Depression of the 1930s moulding
attitudes and aspirations that would, in turn, be the touchstone for their adoles-
cent daughter’s rebellion. At the same time, the contrasting experience of Janet’s
older sister, born just six years earlier yet coming of age at a time when she was
more likely to accept the conservative expectations of her parents and the wider
society, highlights the difference effected by a short span of years and the impor-
tance of considering the influence of individual character and circumstances
alongside that of social context. The contrasting experience of the two sisters
also highlights how responses to established gender expectations may be one sig-
nificant element of generational conflict, and indeed that generational experience
is complicated by gender, as well as class and ethnicity.
The Janet Davey oral history also illustrates how generational identity is
fashioned and consolidated in memory by individuals who draw upon collective
representations of generational identity as one way of making sense of their lives.
The remembrance for Gough Whitlam at his passing in 2014, and the celebration
of ‘the Whitlam years’, is just the latest affirmation of a cultural memory that con-
tinues to consolidate the generational identity of Australians who came of age
with ‘It’s Time’ in the late 1960s and early 1970s.47 For Janet and others of her
age group, the ‘60s generation’ has become an important element of historical
consciousness. Indeed, the notion of generation is one of the key ways that
people mark historical time and explain their connection to historical periods
and forces. People use ‘generation’ as one way of understanding and articulating
historical change, both in their own lives and as their lives intersect with the lives
of others. Though, as we have seen with the late Baby Boomers who are not part
of that 60s generation, generational categories can be exclusive as well as inclus-
ive; not everyone recognises themselves as part of a generation. The pervasive
collective memory of the 60s generation impacts on the life stories of people

47
It’s Time’ was the slogan used for the Australian Labor Party election campaign in 1972.
 Thomson: Memory, Oral History and Generational Identity in Postwar Australia 57

who perceive themselves to be members of that generation, perhaps emphasising

some ways of making sense of one’s life while muting others. For example,
though Janet chose teacher training because a studentship enabled the financial
independence she desired, in her life history she highlights her membership of
the first generation to benefit from free higher education. Similarly, Janet’s nar-
rative emphasis on intergenerational conflict mutes more complex family
dynamics.
Further research is required to assess how generational identity might impact
upon social and political behaviour, or indeed the extent to which members of a
self-defining generation might collaborate, consciously or otherwise, in political
action. But there’s no doubt that Australians who came of age in the 1960s and
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early 1970s are still centrally involved in struggles over the cultural and political
legacy of their youth, just as the experience and memory of the 1930s Depression
impacted on policy makers responsible for social reform in postwar Australia.48
Generations need to be taken seriously as a feature of Australian social and pol-
itical life, and as a concept for careful historical analysis, and that analysis cannot
be left to the clichéd, ahistorical stereotypes of media pundits.

Professor Alistair Thomson

Monash University
Email: alistair.thomson@monash.edu

48
See Frank Bongiorno, ‘Whitlam, the 1960s and the Program’, Inside Story, 16 December 2013, at
http://insidestory.org.au/whitlam-the-1960s-and-the-program (accessed 12 February 2015).