Rating: Admirable
I bought The Year Everything Changed: 2001 believing that I knew what would be its main focus, but when I finally got around to reading it, it turned out to be quite different to my initial impression; mostly because the text provides quite a personal examination of the year 2001, which is totally fair enough. Phillipa McGuiness lost a baby that year, a tragedy that can’t help but be the lens through which she views the significant events of that year. Like her personal tragedy, that year’s major events are still playing out as we speak. After a fine introduction McGuinness divides the year into months and then advances systematically. There’s quite a bit of Australian content, which makes a change, but also makes sense, as McGuinness is an Australian publisher and author. There’s an examination of the muted celebrations of Australia’s Centenary of Federation, which, of all the events that occurred that year, I’d completely forgotten about. After reading about the unsuccessful attempts at whipping up some public enthusiasm, I’m not surprised. More significantly there are thorough examinations of the Howard government’s weaponisation of the Tampa Affair (‘children overboard’) as a means to demonise asylum seekers and immigrants in general into an election winning ploy that the Coalition used to their advantage for decades. There’s also the dot-com bubble and the emergence of early tech-bro dominance in the form of Google (founded in 1998, but really got going by 2001) and Apple, having launched the iPod in that year. McGuinness also muses over John Howard’s obsession with Don Bradman and the emergent revelations of widespread sexual abuse by Catholic priests. It's all pretty serious, but interesting, stuff.
The one event that overshadows everything else that happened in 2001 is, of course, the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It’s one of those events where everyone alive at the time can remember where they were and what they were doing. 9/11 is the THE major event of 2001 that echoes through the subsequent decades. McGuinness handles it well, her style sitting somewhere between formal and informal, mingling the personal with the factual and getting into the raw exposed nerves of the tragedy. In Australia, due to the events of 9/11, John Howard invoked the ANZUS treaty and went all in with the Bush administration’s determined efforts to root out the perpetrators in Afghanistan. One of the main impressions I went away with after reading The Year Everything Changed: 2001 is a strong reminder of just how reprehensible the Howard government was. The moral and ideological failings of the Howard era have been subsumed by the successive horrors of the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison Coalition governments and the relative failings of the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments. The Year Everything Changed: 2001 provides a timely reminder that John Howard’s conservative neoliberal ideology helped create many of the problems that plague Australia now. Despite sometimes finding The Year Everything Changed: 2001 a bit dry, I did enjoy reading it and it can be seen as a successful attempt at examining that pivotal year from a unique perspective.
