dolorosa_12 | Friday open thread: fundamental changes

I wasn't sure how to title this week's open thread, but hopefully it will become clear what I'm asking.

Today's prompt is inspired by an article I read in my hometown's local newspaper, looking into the history behind Australia's adoption of decimal currency, which happened 60 years ago. They interviewed a woman who works at Australia's national mint (Canberra being Canberra, I — like virtually every Canberran school child — went on a school trip to the mint at some point, and it's also located on the same street as a) the pool where I learnt to swim, b) the location of my gymnastics club (although this moved to another venue two years after I started gymnastics classes), and c) the place where I did first aid training when I was working in child care), and the whole thing is a great snapshot of a moment of fundamental change in the way Australians lived their day-to-day lives.

Similar changes I can think of include Sweden shifting to driving on the right-hand side of the road, Samoa shifting into a different time zone in 2011, various countries changing to the Gregorian calendar, or massive political shifts such as a country gaining independence or having its borders redrawn (e.g. German reunification, the breakup of Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union, etc), or becoming part of the EU or similar international groupings.

So my question is: are there any similar fundamental changes that took place in your country? Were they within your own lifetime?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lilysea

Medicare (Australia) providing free or subsidised healthcare came in on 1 February 1984.

I was alive, but as I was born in 1976 and was therefore 8 in 1984, I don't remember it.

From:

dolorosa_12

Oh yes, that's a good example! I wasn't born in February 1984, so Medicare has been in existence for my entire life.

From:

lilysea

I wasn't born in February 1984

Huh, today I learned!

(I thought you were either my age, or up to 5 years older than me)

From:

dolorosa_12

Oh wow, I'm amused that I seem 10-15 years older than I actually am! No, I was born in the 1980s.

From:

kore

I did not guess that, either!

"Socialized" medicine made such a huge difference in so many countries. Even the US.

From:

dolorosa_12

This is incredible to me! I tend to think of myself as an absolutely stereotypical millennial whose formative childhood years were so obviously the 1990s, so I'm amused to discover that I come across as 10-15 years older than that! I was born in the mid-1980s.

Socialised healthcare (or even the sort of hybrid system Australia and most of continental Europe have) is so utterly transformative.

From:

kore

It can be wild! When I was younger people tended to think I was older because I read a lot of classics and wasn't that into TV, so my points of reference were off. Now that just makes me seem clueless, lol.

From:

rekishi

The reunification is one of my earliest memories (I was 6). It has been a struggle, growing together, for this country. And we're still not done. Maybe we're actually further apart than ever, I'm not sure.

From:

dolorosa_12

I was alive for the reunification, but I was only four years old and it was on the other side of the world, so I don't remember it (my husband does, of course), but whenever I think about it, it makes me emotional and weepy. I agree with you that its promise has not yet been fulfilled, but that actual actions that brought it into being were an incredible feat of human spirit and hope.

From:

vargrave

In 1991, the first ever vaccine for HPV started development at the University of Queensland.

Showing my age here, but no, I wasn't alive then, though I was born by the time the vaccines actually started being rolled out in 2007.

Apparently there was zero documented cases of cervical cancer among women under 25 across Australia in 2021, which was very nice to hear. It was in the 2025 Cervical Cancer Elimination Progress Report, which said that the cause was "almost certainly" due to the vaccine.

From:

dolorosa_12

I was born in the 1980s, so I remember when the vaccine was rolled out — I was among the first cohort of Australian women being called in to get the HPV vaccine in 2007. I remember it well. It's an absolutely incredible, and impressive achievement.

From:

lilysea

I remember when the HPV vaccine first came out - I was too old to get it for free, and they were like "if you want it, it will be $1500 out of pocket".

So I didn't get it, because I didn't have that sort of money available.

I ALSO remember when the chickenpox vaccine first came out - I had chickenpox for the first time very very badly when I was 19, and then the vaccine came out 5 years later, and I was so angry/frustrated/disappointed that I hadn't managed to avoid chickenpox long enough to get the vaccine. (especially since chickenpox lives in your spine forever and can come back as shingles, and the latest research seems to show other long term health implications as well)

From:

superborb

There is a shingles vaccine now though! I hear it's one of the more painful ones, but better than shingles.

From:

raven

For me: Brexit, which I was--as you know--part of the machinery for. At this small remove it feels like a strange fever dream. The funny thing is that my workload is still about 75% Brexit; until June of this year at least, at which point it might finally, finally begin to trickle away.

My parents were both born in 1955, which was only eight years after independence, and a mere five after the founding of the republic. I always think of this every time I look at my overseas citizenship card, which states that my entitlement arises from the fact I was a "citizen of the Republic of India on or after 15 August 1947". It feels so recent, when you put it like that; my own grandparents didn't fall in that category.

From:

dolorosa_12

It was predicted after the result of the referendum that the UK would be dealing with the legal and legislative consequences for at least the next decade, so I'm unsurprised to discover that that seems to be accurate.

Indian independence (and indeed the post-colonial independence of most formerly colonised countries in Asia, Europe and Africa) is so recent — as you say, a huge, incredible change, still within living memory.

From:

isis

An argument could be made that my country is currently going through fundamental changes. I hate them.

From:

kore

Yeah, altho I guess for us it's more "wholesale destruction of the government, and will he nuke Iran now or later". Gahh.

From:

dolorosa_12

You're not wrong, although the grassroots resistence to those changes (which from my perspective seemed a bit slow to get going, although being stunned by shock is an understandable reaction) is incredibly admirable and impressive. People are not passively accepting this without a fight.

From:

vriddy

Your decimal mention reminded me of moving to the euro, for some reason, even though that's probably not what you had in mind! Buying treats in a small local shop, and the shopkeeper painstakingly doing the conversion with a calculator to return the change in what would be our new currency. That felt like a big deal!

From:

dolorosa_12

I think it definitely counts as the sort of thing I was imagining with this prompt — it was a big deal! That's so cool that you experienced the changeover in such a concrete way.

From:

tellshannon815

Unfortunately, the one that comes to mind is Brexit (going decimal here was before I was born). The Berlin Wall was one I wished I could properly remember when I ended up researching it for a fic to try and get some sense of whether someone would feasibly be able to dismiss the possibility as "That's not going to happen in my lifetime" when someone else raised the suggestion somewhere around 1987-8. (The character in my icon, a time traveller from 2019, stands up and shouts "Bet you 10 Deutsche Marks you're wrong!")

From:

dolorosa_12

Yes indeed, Brexit is also a big one for me — it happened after I'd been living in the UK for eight years, with the referendum date being just a month after I'd become a British citizen. The two events are inextricably (and painfully) linked in my mind, because my new British passport was literally pushed through the mail slot in my door at the same moment I blearily woke up, and my husband switched on the TV to be greeted with Farage's smug face crowing about a 'bloodless revolution.' It completely tainted any positive feelings I might have had about becoming a citizen.

From:

eglantiere

well, yeah. lol. it's for the most part wildly depressing (minus the USSR to RF transition, athough i was too small to notice any of it.)

bulgaria switched to euro in january, and despite the local cryptonazi trying for a whole year froth it into some kinda national tragedy thing, the actual transfer went pretty smoothly. (it helps that lev was firmly tethered to euro for a while before that). personally i'm mostly relieved to be juggling two currencies instead of three.

From:

dolorosa_12

Oooof, yes, not particularly positive changes (to put things mildly).

I saw that Bulgaria had switched to the euro — it's cool that the transition went smoothly!

From:

mific

I lived through NZ changing to dollars and a decimal-based currency (from British-like pounds before), and changing from miles per hour to kms per hour. I was young, though, and barely remember it other than being annoyed that there were no more sixpences to hide in Christmas puddings, and the need for a lot of mental arithmetic.

More recently, a big change that ended up not being one was Y2K, with all the anxiety beforehand. I even stockpiled cash and some basic supplies! And in the end it wasn't an issue, because it was SUCH an issue that businesses and organisations did take it seriously and made the necessary fixes.

From:

dolorosa_12

I've heard so many people say the same thing about sixpences (whether in NZ, Australia or the UK itself, which kept pounds and pence, but switched from base-12 to base-10) — it seems to have been a remarkably consistent experience!

Y2K is a great example that kind of slipped beneath the radar because it was so well handled that in the popular consciousness it's been incorrectly remembered as an unnecessary fuss about nothing. I was only a teenager at the time so I don't remember making any particular preparations, but I must ask my parents if they took precautions like you.

From:

monksandbones

What springs to mind for me is Canada's metrification, which officially concluded in 1985, just after I was born, but which has remained somewhat incomplete, mainly, I suspect, as a result of proximity to the US. As a child of the aftermath of the metric conversion, I grew up with the combination of the official metric system/unofficial usage-specific imperial system that Canadians now use, but with near-zero ability to convert between them (because Canada was officially metric by the time I was in school, why teach conversions?).

There's still a generational gap between people who grew up in pre-metric times, who grok things like degrees fahrenheit and miles and ounces, and those of us who grew up after the metric conversion!

From:

dolorosa_12

Australia seems similar to Canada in this regard, although (lacking that proximity to the US) the transition was much more complete and final.

I don't actually know when Australia went fully metric, but it was definitely before my birth, since we only ever used metric measurements for temperature, distance, length/height, weight and volume in every context. Older Australians of my parents' generation struggle to convert their height from feet to centimetres, but I would say everyone of my age (I'm a similar age to you) or younger just thinks entirely in metric measurements. I can't do conversions without an online converter, and can't visualise any imperial measurements.

From:

kore

From:

dolorosa_12

Oh gosh, for me there's gay marriage being legalized, and the discovery of retroviral therapy for AIDS, and Obamacare, that was HUGE for my generation and later (and trump etc doesn't count right now!)....One giant thing that gets overlooked a bit in my experience is the giant lawsuit against the tobacco companies that led to, not the end of smoking, but how many millions of lives were saved. If you look at movies and shows smoking was *everywhere." There was an ashtray on every table, nearly everywhere.

These are all really amazing things, and you're right, they utterly transformed life in concrete ways for the better. (I get so annoyed with people who say that marriage equality is an unnecessary little piece of respectability politics: tell me you've never met a single immmigrant without telling me you've never met a single immigrant.) Australia was a lot more ahead of the times with smoking regulations — it was already banned in most indoor public spaces (restaurants, offices, etc) by the time I was born in the 1980s, although when I was a teenager in the 1990s people still smoked in nightclubs — I remember going out clubbing at underage clubs when I was 14 and 15 and coming home reeking like an ashtray. They're currently trying to implement smoking bans in outdoor public spaces as well — places like outdoor seating in restaurants and so on.

.I would guess the very biggest change I lived through, pre-Trump (and preparing the way for him) was the shift in the post-9/11 society, but that's really depressing

What's more depressing is that because Trump is even worse (just grotesquely awful in every conceivable way) that the awfulness of the GWB period has been retrospectively excused and forgotten in some quarters.

From:

kore

I get so annoyed with people who say that marriage equality is an unnecessary little piece of respectability politics

Yeeeeah no, I lived through the AIDS crisis when partners weren't allowed to enter hotel rooms, or plan funerals, or get custody of children, or or....it was horrifying. I personally hate that kind of criticism, because a lot of it seems to be virtue signalling (and like you say marriage equality applies to other populations too!).

because Trump is even worse (just grotesquely awful in every conceivable way) that the awfulness of the GWB period has been retrospectively excused and forgotten in some quarters.

Oh God, yeah, that happened with Bush Mark I and it's happened with Bush Mark II/Cheney too. Hell, people were already seemingly forgetting about GWB post-Clinton until suddenly some of the same issues came up with Obama.

From:

merit

I was reading some of the comments and was huh. I did get the HPV vaccine in 2007! And it has been a massive net good for women with rates of cancer declining.

Voting for same sex marriage was also great. I also hoped that the Voice would go ahead but unfortunately no.

From:

dolorosa_12

We have John Howard to thank for the HPV being funded and rolled out so effectively — if I recall correctly, his wife had (and survived) cervical cancer, so he had a personal reason to support efforts to find a medical cure or effective prevention. It's one of the very few positives of his prime ministership.

I understand constitutionally why things like marriage equality and the Voice have to go to a referendum, but I have a really strong ideological opposition to the rights of minorities being contingent on a vote from the majority. That said, it was wonderful to vote for marriage equality, and I had little doubt it would pass, since the religious right isn't such of a thing in Australia, and the only real opposition came from this small minority of people opposing it on religious grounds.

The result of the Voice referendum was really disappointing, but not surprising to me. Not because Australians are any more racist than any other country, but non-Indigenous Australians are as a whole not really capable of having a mature, rational political conversation about structural racism and the damage and inequalities that resulted from European colonisation, and tend to react really defensively when these things are brought up ('that stuff all happened in the past, why are you still upset about it and trying to make us feel guilty about it, and anyway racism is much worse in the US' would seem to me a pretty accurate paraphrasing). With marriage equality, it was really easy for the heterosexual, cisgender majority to understand that they were voting to give the LGBT minority rights that they themselves already had — in other words, voting to make everyone equal. With the Voice, it was really easy to convince the non-Indigenous majority that a Yes vote was voting to give Indigenous people rights that the majority didn't have — what was in reality a vote to mitigate major, structural inequalities was successfully portrayed as favouritism. And the disproportionate airtime given to Indigenous campaigners opposing the Voice from both the left and the right made the waters look a lot muddier than they actually were, and gave wavering non-Indigenous voters a kind of psychological cover to justify their No votes.