Australia's Year in Review 2009
How will 2009 be remembered in the Australian mind? With enormous heartache and anguish for many, since any audit of the Australian year has to start with the awfulness of February, and the blackest of Saturdays, when 173 people lost their lives and over 400 were injured. Already, it has been written into the history books as the worst peacetime disaster since Federation, and already it has prompted a rethink about how Australia confronts what has always been an unsettling reality: that the country occupies one of the most fire-prone corners of the planet.
2009 was supposed to be the year when Australia was consumed by the global economic environment. On its very eve, the December quarter had delivered that most perplexing of economic oxymorons - three months of "negative growth" - and most predicted that a recession was inevitable.
Instead, the last 12 months have been dominated by Australia's physical environment: the worst bushfires in living memory, the continuation of the worst drought in over a century and a policy row over how to contend with climate change that dragged on for much of the political year and led to its chaotic denouement. By early December, when global leaders gathered in Copenhagen to decide how to confront the perils of anthropogenic climate change, the political debate in Australia had reverted to the question of whether it even existed. 2009 was the year when Australia's fragile political consensus on climate change came to an abrupt end.
In a year when Australia was reminded once again of the economic benefits of its powerhouse resources sector, perhaps 2009 was not the most audacious time for the Rudd government to push for its emissions trading sector. The argument that it would damage the very thing which continues to underwrite Australia's prosperity had even more resonance, and gained even more editorial traction, in a year when, against all the odds, Australia remained so very prosperous.
In 2009, the country managed to complete an impressive hat-trick, avoiding recession during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, the 2000 dot-com bust and now the global economic downturn. With its strictly regulated banking sector, the Australian economic model fashioned by Hawke, Keating and Howard was much envied at the start of the year. Now it is spoken of in almost hallowed tones amongst public policy experts around the globe.
The "wonder from down under", as the country's economic resilience came to be called, also helped burnish Kevin Rudd's international credentials, in a year when he was asked to become a "friend of the chair" at Copenhagen, and a senior administration official in Washington said publicly that he was Barack Obama's most trusted fellow leader. On that front, . The gossip in Canberra is that the secretary-generalship of the United Nations has become the main target of Kevin Rudd's personal ambition, in which case 2009 has been useful in embellishing his curriculum vitae, even if it ended in disappointment at Copenhagen.
But the Australian prime minister will be concerned about the deterioration in relations with two other countries which are set to dominate the 21st Century: India and China. Beijing fell out with Canberra over its thwarted plans to invest in the resources sector, the visit of Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer, and the arrest in Shanghai of the Rio Tinto executive and Australian national, Stern Hu. Kevin Rudd's fluent Mandarin has yet to translate into a happy diplomatic relationship with China.
Australia's relations with India, meanwhile, were hampered by a spate of ugly attacks on Indian students in Melbourne and Sydney, and a sluggish response from Canberra. At Copenhagen, the Indians also described Rudd as an "ayatollah".
The Rudd government also confronted another South Asian problem, with a surge of boat people from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan who were trying to reach Australian shores and leave behind their war-torn homelands. Some 1,500 asylum seekers will spend Christmas in the heat, humidity and cramped conditions of the Christmas Island detention centre.
The attacks on the Indian students, combined with what was viewed by some international observers as the paranoiac reaction to the boat people, raised that perennial question of whether Australia is unusually racist. Then, the question was given primetime impetus by the revival of a hit television show from the Seventies and Eighties, Hey Hey It's Saturday, which featured its now notorious "blackface" skit.
For me, there were happier journalistic diversions. A meeting in Fremantle with Claude Choules, the oldest surviving combat veteran of World War I. The apology to Forgotten Australians and former child migrants. Cate Blanchett in A Streetcar Named Desire - even if it took over a month for me to see her performance in all its glorious completeness. There was Samson and Delilah, my Australian film of the year, and, no surprises, the AFI's film of the year. Even a few holes of the longest golf course in the world, which stretches across the vast emptiness of the Nullarbor Plain.
For all that, the journey that I will remember most from 2009 was the winding road, lined with blackened trees, smouldering shells of properties and burnt-out cars, that took us to fire-blighted Kinglake a few days after Black Saturday. High in the hills, an hour north of Melbourne, it is easy to see how it has long been regarded as a route of happy escape for locals and Melbournian weekenders. But on Saturday, 7 February, 2009, it became the scene of a flight of unspeakable terror.
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