Phillipa McGuinness’s Year Everything Changed

Phillipa McGuinness, The Year Everything Changed: 2001 (2018)

Phillipa McGuinness reminds us in her preface to The Year Everything Changed that in 1988, the bicentenary of James Cook’s visit to Australia’s east coast, a number of substantial books called ‘slice histories’ were published: each of them dealt with a single year, a slice of Australian life taken every 50 years starting with 1788. ‘You take a single year,’ McGuinness writes, ‘and interrogate the bejesus out of it.’ This book interrogates the bejesus out of 2001.

The Australian Bicentenary project isn’t the only precursor. Elisabeth Åsbrink’s 1947: When Now Begins, which I read last year in Fiona Graham’s translation, is a brilliant example. Pip McGuinness’s book is also brilliant, but in a very different register: more intimate for one thing, given that one of the key events of her year is intensely personal, and the events she describes, and has researched prodigiously, are part of her living memory, whereas Elisabeth Åsbrink wasn’t yet born in her chosen year.

The book’s structure looks straightforward: a chapter for each month. But actually, at least at first, each chapter takes an event from its month and uses it as a springboard to a general theme. So:

•  January has great fun with the fizzer celebration of the Centenary of Federation, and its more sombre in its account of the inauguration of George W Bush and dick Cheney. Both events allow for quick sketches of the Story So Far.
• February saw the death of Don Bradman and the divorce of Nicole Kidman. There’s a delicious exploration of the differences between the historical Bradman and the way his image was used to represent something about Australia – the icon Bradman. And there’s a list of heroes and icons that were big that year, most of whom are now forgotten.
• In March the iPod came into existence, and OMG how all that has changed!
• April saw the first edition of Black Inc’s Quarterly Essay, Robert Manne’s The Stolen Generations and the Right, and the chapter ranges over the policies and debates around human rights. In Australia that means the treatment of Aboriginal people and asylum seekers. Elsewhere in the world, same-sex marriage, euthanasia and the death penalty were in the news. Later in the year, the US would officially sanction torture, kidnapping and indefinite detention.
• In May, George Pell became Archbishop of Sydney. The chapter deals mainly with the connection between religion and politics, clerical child abuse in Australia and, inevitably, Islam and violence (including violence against Muslims) everywhere.
• June is the money chapter. ‘Were it not for Tampa and 9/11, in Australia we might remember the year as one of corporate catastrophe.’ One.Tel, insurance company HIH and Ansett all collapsed. Elsewhere Bill Clinton cleared the legislative way for the Global Financial Crisis, and Enron, the seventh largest corporation in the US, went bust. I was reminded that I went to the US that year when the exchange rate was down to just over 48 US cents to our dollar. 
• July was the Australian census, and McGuinness and her family went to live in Singapore. The chapter deals with Australia’s changing demographics, the expat experience, and the twentieth anniversary of AIDS, in 2001 the number one cause of death by infectious disease in the developing world.

I had approached the book expecting a Before and After narrative, with turning points of Tampa, 9/11, and the devastating event in McGuinness’s personal life flagged in the Preface. By the end of July, I was engrossed enough to be no longer reading it that way. Then comes the opening of the August chapter:

We’ve come to the part of 2001 where so much happens that were it a novel, its author would be criticised for over-plotting. Cut out one terrorist attack, one election, one war, one maritime crisis, please, pleads her overwhelmed editor. There are so many villains, where are your heroes? And why don’t you consider a happier ending? But, I counter, facts lined up on my side, all this happened. It’s part of the story. I too wish I could rewrite events, tweak history, even – especially – my own. But I can’t so, cue the high-drama chart-stoppers of 2001. We know the words to the chorus, but let’s pay more attention to the verses.

(Page 173)

And so it goes: the August–November chapters pretty much draw our attention to the verses of songs we kind of know: in August it’s the Tampa, in September 9/11, in October the invasion of Afghanistan, and in November elections – especially those that were won by John Howard and George W Bush.

These chapters are fine examples of narrative history, telling the story in terms of what people knew, suspected or feared at the time and illuminating it with later knowledge only as needed. Although they tell stories that have been told many times, it’s a very personal telling, with odd facts and interesting angles, and oddly refreshing to be reminded of what it looked like back then – before Trump, Iraq, Manus Island and Nauru, but well on the way to all of them.

December is a harrowing account of giving birth to a baby who has died in utero. It might seem that such a chapter belongs in a different book. But in a way it’s what brings this whole book together. Big picture events can make the lives of individual people seem trivial, but that’s an illusion created by distance. All of who lived through those times had big things happen in our personal lives, some connected to the big events (like the casualties of war and terrorism or sacked employees of Ansett, whose voices we hear in their chapters), others not so much, but equally weighty. And anyway, the whole book feels personal – which is no mean achievement given the enormous amount of research that went into it. I don’t know Phillipa McGuinness, but as I’ve been writing this blog post, I’ve had to struggle every time I’ve written a version of her name: I want to call her Pip, which is how she refers to herself in one wry aside, not because I have trouble with the spelling of her personal name, but because by the time I reached the list of friends on page 326 I felt as if I belonged there.

The Year Everything Changed is the second book I’ve read for the 2019 Australian Women Writers Challenge. It was a loan from the Book(-swap) Club.