The 90s
In my first ever memory I was four years old. I can date it thus because the entire memory is of saying “I’m four now” to my parents, and their remarking some sort of agreement. So that’s the years 1994-1998 taken care of. 1998 was a big year because I was made to relinquish my status as an only child due to the birth of my sister and brother (twins). There are other memories of being an only child—flicking slaters in the garden, trying to ride the family golden retriever like a horse and losing purchase on his loose skin— but I can’t date them and so presume they came somewhere in between my fourth birthday (a great time to say ‘I’m four now,’ so as likely as any the time I said it) in March, and my sister and brother’s births in September. Actually, I can very roughly date one more memory to 1998. I was in the bath and my Dad came in and asked me, if I were to have a sibling, whether I’d want a brother or a sister. I said, prophetically, both (For my brother and sister’s twenty first birthday speech I reckoned with the future-changing power I was granted in this moment, and suggested some other demands I might have made in the moment, re., mostly, my sister not spending her first two years of life screaming, my brother the same period vomiting). For years I told this story revealing that it had only much later occurred to me that they had just had sex, I now realise it’s more likely they had discovered that my mother was pregnant, or an appropriate enough time had passed to start hinting to the impossibly, perpetually clueless child.
I’ve spent the last few years becoming increasingly cognisant of a tendency to associate our personal lives with a time and place. People are, for this reason, always suggesting that the decades of their childhood were more innocent and simplistic. The same impulse will see friends come home from holiday with a fully formed opinion for how an entire culture operates, and even in such trivial cases as an insistence that an Australian example of, say, a pad thai is ‘nothing like what you get in Thailand’ I can’t help but bristle than an entire country is reduced to a dozen anecdotal data points.
So this is all to say, what were the nineties like? Perplexing and dark. Only the former can be attributed to observation, it’s hard to explain how the proliferation of cheap LEDs has changed the look of night time. In the 90s, there was just less artificial light all over, and what there was, was pretty green. Movies and photos sometimes capture this, but a photo— especially one made using the camera technology available in the 90s— of darkness, is indistinguishable for what it is. The photos which remain in ready access from the 90s have been self-selected to ignore just how underexposed everything felt and was.
So my conscious memory started around March 1998 and the nineties ended 21 months later in December 1999. Not a whole lot to work with. I was four, and five for those two years, which in Australia are spent in Kindy and PrePrimary. I can date that I must have, macano podracer in hand, interrupted an impromptu puppet show which seemed to hold the rapt attention of the remainder of my class- screaming the Star Wars theme with my best friend Braedan, at 1999, because that’s the year the film came out. But other memories situate themselves only very vaguely. Of finding my favourite bubble blower, a plastic imitation tobacco pipe, was available, I remember breathing detergent deep into my throat and thinking “oh no, not again.” Before racing to the water fountain.
What I remember feeling more than anything in the 90s, was confused. It felt, as it would continue to feel, like everyone was operating on just a bit more information than I was. I can rationalise this now in realising that we were operating on a sort of script, testing out ideas of conviction borrowed from our parents, from other kids. I was just as likely doing the same thing, although it felt like every conversation was a total, rudderless free-for-all.
Children are weird. I wasn’t bullied, although I had glasses and a bowl-cut of red hair, and was shorter than all but a couple of other kindergarteners. If I was, perhaps I was too aloof for any of it to take purchase? But no, I’ll put it down to good fortune. To my experience, bullying didn’t happen, and when it did, it didn’t happen much in my school life.
Classes had similarly little purchase, excepting a few moments which arguably made things worse. To this day I find myself fighting the impulse set forth by our teacher informing us that the wiping our hands against the towel was what actually removed germs, the soap and water’s roles were negligible. But teaching children anything was surely an uphill climb with an uninspiring view at the top. Once that same teacher held a range of fruits printed on card and asked us to call out their names, apples, pears, bananas all went off without a hitch. Until she pulled out an image of a prune. That the teacher had put a picture of excrement amongst the fruits was simply too much for our five year old minds. “Poo!” We called out in immediate unison. Mystified elation.
What were The Nineties like? All of the slides and monkey bars were composed of unpainted aluminium which fried your hands and butt. Televisions were tiny and didn’t have remotes, and if you tilted your head around the bulbous screen, a small parallax of extra light and colour hinted at the infinity outside. In The Nineties you’d be so distracted by loading a VHS that when a loose tooth finally fell, you’d swallow it.
In The Nineties, your friend who is older (already in primary school!) would show you that if you wake up at 6am (no problem) and turn to ABC (the one with the shittiest reception, why?) you could hear the word Rage whispered in a voice which sounded like you were about to get in trouble just for hearing it, and see music videos of the backstreet boys and Britney Spears which felt like (because they were) they were for people much older than you.
In kindergarten, we were invited to present an emergency situation and talk through how we might react. Reyhan had just aced a description of a fire and the ensuing phone calls she would make to triple zero, her parents’ workplaces. I shot my hand up to go next: A robber was at my house, stealing all the bricks! I was asked who I would call, and admitted I had no idea, I was too pleased by the deviousness of a robber stealing a house’s very foundation.