Welcome!

the time this issue goes off sale Christmas will be over for another year and we will be just two days away from the new year. No, make that – 2020, no less! I don’t know about you, but after two decades that were kind of awkward to define (the noughties? the teens?) I like that we can now refer to living in the ’20s. We can only wonder what will happen in this decade. The ’20s in the last century (and it still feels weird saying ‘last century’!) saw a huge amount of change and innovation in Australia. Jazz music arrived from the US and women threw away their corsets and embraced more comfortable fashions. Imagine the relief our 1920s counterparts must have felt when they slipped on their first shapeless shift dress! Commercial radio began to be heard over the wireless in homes around the country, with the first radio dramas broadcast. And the motor car was becoming more mainstream. In 1928, a whopping 10 per cent of Australians owned a car, and Ford began assembling cars in Geelong in Victoria. Vegemite went on sale in 1923 after being developed by Aussie chemist Cyril Callister. The Flying Doctor service was launched. A young cricketer called Donald Bradman scored his first century, while the first game of ‘women’s basketball’, now netball, was played. Qantas was established, and the first swimsuit was sold under the brand name of Speedo. It’s not really that surprising, then, that the decade earned the nickname the ‘Roaring Twenties’. And now we are on the precipice of the next decade of ’20s. Given the pace of change during the first 20 years of this century, who knows how different our lives might be 10 years from now? My wish for all of our wonderful readers is that the new year and the new decade are good to you and your loved ones. Happy New Year!