Let's blame the baby boomers

Gee, let me apologise to the generations with their various labels who are being told that the housing shortages, the faults in the taxation system, the brand-new "generational inequality" and probably the price of oranges are the fault of the baby-boomers.

It is easy political tactics to create an us and a them and to then blame 'them'.
Fair go. I was born too early to be a baby-boomer, by just one year, but I married one of the earlier ones and she's done 57 years with me without missing a beat and without needing any major maintenance.

Let me say quite clearly that I had no say about when and where I was born. I just woke up one afternoon and there I was.

There is a story about all this that tells how easily the baby-boomers had it.

Dad was born in 1910 and became a book-keeper, though he really wanted to be a farmer. He had grown up close to the earth at Euroa and out along the Seven Creeks. He was a young book-keeper in the Big Smoke when the Great Depression rolled over us all. He lost several jobs and every reference said "due to economic circumstances", so he took the bull by the horns and bought a very undeveloped farm at The Gurdies down on Western Port.

His parents and some others came to live on the farm at various times. They shared the work and whatever income they could make and they all got through those bad years. Dad lost an eye in a shooting accident down there and Uncle George "Chooka" lost a thumb in dramatic circumstances.

If you'll allow a quick detour that'll make more sense in a moment, Uncle Chooka was bitten on the thumb by a brown snake while he was stacking timber. Without hesitation he grabbed an axe, put his hand on a stump and cut off his thumb. That got rid of all the poison...and the thumb.
I can remember talking to him about this, and I can remember him saying there was no hospital within reach, and no doctor. Sixty or more years Iater I can still remember him saying that sometimes you need to make the hard decisions fast, because if you stop to think you'll never make the decision. Hard times bring up hard men.
I was born at The Gurdies, a little unexpectedly, on August 1, 1945, just a shade early to be a genuine boomer. My father was up on the ridge east of the road, cutting timber to burn for charcoal, used in 'gas-burning' cars instead of petrol.
A conversion kit included a large drum attached to the back of the car in which charcoal was burned again to produce a gas, on which the car would run, albeit with a lot less power. Producing the charcoal, at least for Dad and his brothers, meant digging a pit, filling it with fairly solid logs, lighting it and then covering it with earth, a process sometimes called stoving, so that the logs would burn fairly slowly and produce the maximum charcoal.
A few days later the pit would be uncovered and the charcoal sifted out and into bags for sale. It was hard and dirty work but it kept the wolf from the door.
Dad was depending on petrol, though, to get Mum to the doctor in Lang Lang when the time came, or thought he was dependent. He'd borrowed a car, bought a petrol ration and parked the car near the front door, ready to go. In theory all was in readiness.
I was my father's first child, though, and he was bit over excited about the whole thing. He rode in professional bike races at the time. He rushed down to the house when the news reached him, grabbed his coat and scarf – it was August, after all - jumped on his bike and pedalled like the blue blazes for Lang Lang, a mere 13 kilometres away, though the road was a little basic.
The doctor gave him a ride back to the house but this all took time and I was "sitting up eating with a knife and fork" when the doctor got there. Grandma had delivered me, another first for her, and she had got so confident that she openly wondered why we'd needed a doctor at all.
Later, Dad bought his own car, from Perc Eacott in Longwarry, the Rootes Group dealer. My Dad moved us to another undeveloped dairy farm in Longwarry in 1948 or so, The racing bike had gone and he bought a 1953 Commer 10 utility. I cannot help comparing it with today's super-utes. You know, the ones you cannot see around when you're backing out of a shopping centre car park, This little Commer took us all over the High Country and into NSW and Canberra, with Mum and Dad in the front and we four kids in the back, with the tonneau pulled up to our chins in the winter.
I tell this little story to explain where we privileged 'boomers' came from.
Fast-forward through many lean and hard-working years to 1967, when I was engaged and coming home from South Vietnam. Generation X was being born. My wife-to-be, bless her, had rented a flat and bought all the brushes and brooms and detergents and soaps and so on that we needed – that came to a shocking $32. We honeymooned in Tasmania and when we got back we had $40 left and a $44 car payment due.
She is good with money though, this one, and two years later her salary had climbed to about $2800 a year and we had bought our block of land at Narre Warren for $2200. I had gone back to college and entered the teaching service on $2100 or so a year. That was exciting, but there was not much left in the tin. We were spending $16 a fortnight on groceries, and yet every week we had enough change for a treat, often a bottle of wine and sometimes a steak.
A year after we paid off the block we were about to move into our first house, with an $8000 war service loan and a $1700 chattel mortgage. We panicked about that extra $1700 but the house cost nearly $10,000. The chattel mortgage had a five year term but we paid it off in three and a half years. That house was ten and a half squares, had three bedrooms and we thought it was a palace. It was a lovely little home. It was 95 square metres in today's measures. Our daughter was born during this time.
This is not boasting in any sense. Our friends were all doing the same things, facing the same challenges. We could freely admit to not being able to afford various things, with no embarrassment. When we were finally able to carpet our lounge room – we had punched, filled sanded and sealed the boards long beforehand, working it all out along the way – we had friends who came for a drink, to look at the carpet and share our sense of progress. It was a different world socially.