Pixel Dust @ 55

As a lover of nostalgia and pop culture, it would be impossible for me to reflect on arriving at my mid-fifties without a look back at where it all began.

I was in-utero when JFK was assassinated in November 1963 and just three months old when The Beatles toured Australia. As a 1964 baby it’s fair to say that I experienced a lot of the 1960s in retrospect – the fashion, the music, the history were probably better appreciated from the seventies, eighties and beyond.

From as early as I can recall, my grandmother was a faithful reader of The Australian Women’s Weekly. It began publication in 1933 when she was just 21 and remains one of the country’s top selling publications some 85 plus years later.

The covers are a microcosm of the great changes that The Weekly’s readership has seen between 1964 and now. I love those from those early weeks in March 1964 when I was born. 

You can check out a selection of The Weekly covers at Trove, an electronic database hosted by The  National Library of Australia and an invaluable resource for all things Australian. I was only a couple of years out of high school in 1983 when The Weekly moved to a monthly format - though wisely retaining its 50 year old name – can you imagine The Australian Women’s Monthly? Yeh … nup. 

Today, we’re still into fashion – clothes, shoes, accessories, hairstyles – but perhaps creating our own clothing has largely gone the way of black and white television and library cards. We’re still eating, but it feels like there’s less time for cooking. We’re still having babies, but the involvement of science in giving the birds and the bees some personal coaching has raised some challenging issues. Gender has become a word with more connotations than years The Weekly has been printed, and the roles of women have changed beyond compare. I personally hope that ‘superwoman’ has been called out for the unrealistic and stressful bar it held over us for way too long. You might have been able to ‘have it all’ … but odds on you were too tired to enjoy it.

The inside pages of The Weekly were sprinkled with society goss and an ongoing love affair with the Royal Family (you always kept the editions when there was a key royal event – births, deaths, weddings, coronations and of course, Australian tours). My mother in law thoughtfully put aside The Weekly editions from when my children were born as I was just a little pre-occupied at the time.

Today, it is celebrity that tends to dominate the covers and prompt us to part with our heard-earned to buy a copy. In my birthday month of March 2019, the Royals are there with a very pregnant Meghan, and celebs are gracing the cover with Joanna Lumley and the terrific Amanda Keller. Given Amanda’s popular roles on The Living Room, the reboot of Dancing with the Stars and her radio programme Jonesey and Amanda on Radio 2WS, audiences obviously agree you can be awesome in your fifties and belong on our airwaves and screens. Check out Amanda chatting hard with Tom Gleeson.

You couldn’t have grown up with The Weekly and not be familiar with a woman whose name was synonymous with it – Ita Buttrose. Ita was at the helm of The Weekly during my high school years, a time when I was looking for role models, particularly in journalism. I remember reading her editor’s columns where she’d often share about her kids, Kate and Ben, who weren't that much younger than me. It was probably my first experience of someone in the public eye writing about their everyday in such a way as to make it relatable. Ita was articulate, elegant and somehow able to appeal to the everywoman – as well as women-to-be like a teenaged me.

I’ve discovered that the confidence that she managed to engender into people hasn’t dissipated over the years as she was recently appointed Chair of the ABC. I am an avid watcher of the ABC, but I have longed for a national broadcaster that could not be so obviously identified with either side of the political fence. I’d love to see more reportage and less agenda across all our networks. Can Ita manage it, taking on what appears something of a poisoned chalice? One thing I am confident of – her age (77) won’t get in the way. 

Ita once said that words are like little drops of ink, so in this world of the blogosphere I guess I am sprinkling my own version of pixel drops. I’m loving being in my fifties, and I embrace sharing these years via one of the most significant gamechangers that twentieth century readers of The Weekly  could never have imagined - the world wide web.

So, viva being 55 and new horizons, including this blog, Bountiful Life.

PS: I am a firm believer that there is a song for every occasion and I plan to prove it whenever I can on this blog. For this post, it has to be Ita by Cold Chisel (1980). They obviously believed in her too.

Tracey 👍