8 - Golden age, 1946–1974

Summary

The third quarter of the twentieth century was an era of growth unmatched since the second half of the nineteenth century. The population almost doubled, economic activity increased more than threefold. There were jobs for all men who wanted them. People lived longer, in greater comfort. They expended less effort to earn a living, had more money for discretionary expenditure, greater choice and increased leisure. Sustained growth brought plenty to Australians and habituated them to further improvement: a belief in the capacity of science to turn scarcity into abundance was matched by the institutional confidence to solve problems and ameliorate social life. The facilities of intellectual life and the possibilities for artistic practice expanded. The country became less isolated from the rest of the world and less beleaguered in its domestic arrangements.

Coming after the sacrifice of the preceding decades and the return to uncertainty that followed in the 1970s, it was a golden age. But as the ancients discerned a cyclical pattern of history, which saw the purposeful vigour of an ascendant civilisation soften into indulgence, disunity and eventual collapse, so post-war Australia followed a worrying trajectory. The iron age of austerity occupied the 1940s; the 1950s were the silver years of growing confidence and conformity; by the golden 1960s disunity and decay had set in, and the regime could not withstand the discordant forces it had released.