Postkiwi

Hugh Mackay’s Generations was published by Pan Macmillan Australia in 1997. It’s now out of print but is in most Australian libraries. In this research-based book Mackay gives us three slices of Australian life by describing the ‘Lucky’ Generation – born in the 1920s, the ‘Stress’ Generation – born in 1946-1955, and the ‘Options’ Generation, born in the 1970s.

In this post, I am engaging with the second chapter on the ‘Lucky Generation’ – the tribal elders.

A word of caution right from the start. This is a slice, not the whole cohort. What about the people born in the 1930s and 1940s? Mackay acknowledges right at the start (pp. 3-4) that he has narrowed down 25 years into ten years. These smaller cohorts, Mackay writes, are symbolic of the changes in Australian attitudes.

To compare Mackay’s analysis with the Meredith and Schewe’s schema, the Lucky Generation would correspond with the World War II cohort, coming of age during the war years, but too young to serve overseas. Missing in the Mackay approach is a whole cohort who came of age in the late 1940s and 1950s. It could be argued that the ‘missing cohort’ did not have a binding experience to differentiate them from the ‘lucky’ ones and so tended to reflect the values of their elder ‘brothers and sisters’.

Mackay starts with the meaning behind his description:

Lucky – charmed – because of timing of each of the phases of their journey through the life cycle. Their lives begin in hardship (childhood), but blossom during their middle years.

Values learnt from a depression childhood

Loyalty
Saving
The work ethic
Sense of mutual obligation
Patriotism

Values learnt from a wartime adolescence

Strong community spirit
National identity – linked with ‘Britishness’
Pride in Australian capacity to take its place in the war

Values lived out in the Post-war Boom

Optimism – hope for a new egalitarian middle-class Australia
Openness to new immigrants based on expected assimilation
Early marriage
Demand for new housing – in new suburbs

Parenting the Boomers

Mackay tells us that his focus groups of ‘lucky’ Australians felt good about progress in parenting. It was because they didn’t have to work so hard to make a living – they had more time for family in the suburbs. Parents, more educated now, were less rigid and authoritarian. Societal attitudes towards children rewarded parents who valued their children as people. Mackay inserts a rider provided by the Boomer focus groups who felt that it was they who made the real progress as parents. ‘Lucky’ parents look back and wonder if they over indulged their children, succumbing to an emerging materialism.

‘Lucky Women’

Mackay points out that it was possible for women to leave paid employment at the birth of their first child, and never to go back. This was an exciting development for the Lucky generation who had gone through an unstable decade of economic turmoil in which ‘stay at home’ mums would have been working without technological aids to make ends meet. In their latter years, the women of the Lucky generation have to grapple with the independent approaches of the Boomer women. On the one hand they are glad that their daughters have a greater capacity to negotiate the terms of their marriages and leave them if need be. But the complexity and stress linked with unclear gender roles seems to puzzle many of the older generation.

Society seems to be deteriorating

At the turn of the twenty first century the Lucky Generation report a sense of insecurity.
Lack of physical safety – linked to fear of going out at night
Disappointment – uneasiness about the loss of integrity in society, loss of shared moral values, loss of sense of belonging to a community.

Three Biggest Changes

1. Television – most were already raising a family when they bought their first TV.
2. Widespread Car Ownership – symbolic of a general shift from public to private space, the rise of the individual and the extraordinary emphasis placed on travel in the last quarter of the 20th century.
3. Kids Living Together – Mackay reports that his focus groups were proud of the fact they had been able to develop a generally tolerant attitude toward sexual liberation among their own children and grandchildren. This is alongside their pride at their own more solemn approach to marriage. But yet they are still critical of the concept of instant gratification.

Warnings for the future

Mackay finishes with a few warnings from the Lucky ones:

• Too many values have evaporated in the face of relentless materialism
• Too many working mothers are neglecting their children and destablising both family and the labour market
• The idea of self-sacrifice has been lost
• Technology is clever but hardly likely to be our salvation
• Instant gratification is a dangerous trap

Lucky Authors

The chapter finishes with a reference to two spokesmen for the Lucky Generation of Australia.

Ronald Conway, author of “The Great Australian Stupor: An Interpretation of an Australian Way of Life”, suggests that this no-nonsense, self reliant generation may be the last of the ‘bed-rock’ generations on which something distinctive and enduring can be built.

Donald Horne is author of “The Lucky Country”, first published in 1964 and revised in 1998. Horne warns his own generation that their prosperity has been more to do with luck than with good management or enlightened thinking. His book provides a radical critique of the philistinism, provincialism and dependence of Australian society.

Mackay remarks on the fact that this generation have benefited from low taxation when raising their own families, and are now the generation who enjoy the provisions of a generous age provision.

Recognition

Mackay had the privilege of sitting with these tribal elders. We have the privilege of having their insights passed on to us. Even though I grew up in New Zealand, I recognise much of the portrait of the Lucky Generation in the lives of my parents, both of whom were born in the 1920s. The only remarkable difference would be the absence of Holden as an icon of widespread car ownership.