As I write this, I’m still in my fifties — just.
By the time you read it, I’ll be sixty.
AUTHOR: ROBERT GODDEN

I’m swinging between not caring and caring very much, thank you. I remember Prime Minister John Howard arguing that the year 2000 was the last year of the twentieth century, not the first year of the twenty-first, and I’ve been wondering if I can use the same logic. Maybe next year is my sixties, and this year I’m 50–10.

You know who is distraught? My dad! I told him he was about to be the father of a 60-year-old and he told me it was the worst thing anyone had said to him all year. I chose not to remind him of the alternative.

It made me wonder: am I old now? And if so — what’s my job here?
What can I do for now, and the next generation? Can I make the world a better place — or at least not make it any worse?

I am old. I feel it every time I stand up or sit down, or attempt to do one while I’m wishing I was doing the other.

Something that occurred to me in my relative youth — around 45 — was that as a kid, I missed a trick. The more I got into recenthistory, the more I kicked myself for not talking to the WWII veterans who were on every street when I was growing up. Or even people who had lived through the Great Depression. There may even have been veterans of the Great Emu War around, but growing up in Whyalla where you see the odd emu, I imagine they were wisely staying off the street in case it all kicked off again.

Uncle Bill once told me, circa 1978, that when decimal currency arrived in ’66, the baker used it to sneak in a price rise. That was the story I got — not the one about racing a truck full of troops across a bridge in Tobruk, with his brother’s truck right behind him, just before the bridge was blown up. That tale didn’t reach me until years after his death. A genuine Rat of Tobruk, and we talked about baked goods,

In fact, I remember more of a book of naughty jokes I found in his house when I was thirteen than I do of conversations with him.

I know what my Nanna had for dinner in the 1920s as a child, but no idea what she did during the war — while five of her brothers were driving trucks in the army and the sixth was on a navy vessel that collided with another one of ours.

I’d love to know that stuff now.

So, what stories am I sitting on that someone might regret not asking me?

Surely my life’s collected wisdom is more than “music went to crap in the late ’80s and tomatoes used to taste better.”

Is there more to it, though? I used to believe that with age comes wisdom, but Donald Trump is older than me — so there goes that theory.

Is it the duty of every 60-year-old and up, to fill these young people with our collective knowledge, whether they like it or not?

My better half would absolutely say no. She’s been the test pilot for my material for more than 40 years, and I’m not sure that’s ever been a blessing.

Not just practical stuff, like putting two seeds in every hole when planting corn, but more esoteric truths. Like a quick appreciation of the role the 1975 Lima Declaration and Plan of Action on Industrial Development and Cooperation had on the decline of automotive manufacturing in Australia vs long-term globalisation and cumulative technological change. I can do ten riveting minutes on the latter any time a young’un asks. Or even if they don’t, but we’re caught in a lift.

Or maybe I can just pass on the few scraps I did get from my elders. I think my Nanna once told me her mother picked peas for a living during the Great Depression. Women’s wages were half those of men, so the men had no jobs at all. Surely that’s a bit of knowledge that, when slid into a young person’s brain in the gap between memes, might actually set them up for a better life.
They could choose to do a pea-picking course, just in case.

Or maybe being me is enough — a carrier of half-remembered stories, obscure wisdom, a patient wife who’s heard them all before, and the eternal belief that tomatoes really did taste better.