Reconstructing the prehistory of my consciousness.
Y’know, for fun.
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“I have no memory of this place.” — Gandalf the Grey, The Fellowship of the Ring
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I arrived on these here earthly shores on 1 November 1988, in Waratah, Newcastle, already too late in the year to belong to it properly and yet stamped by it completely. Whether the hour was 9:42 in the morning or 2:33 in the afternoon hardly affects the public record, but in the private-mythic record it feels like one of those first blurred coordinates a life keeps circling: a date, a hospital, a suburb, a city, a family, a national year already roaring around me before I had any means of receiving it.
I have no memory of Waratah. No image of the hospital. No corridor. No cot. No room. No first ceiling. No hand carrying me out into Newcastle light. No sense of my sister already a year ahead of me in the world, already occupying the family before I arrived into it. No image of my parents as young parents, young enough that their lives were still forming even as mine began. I know the place only because I was told it and because records make a scaffold where memory has nothing to offer: Waratah, NSW, November 1988, first year, first suburb, first point on the map.
Waratah itself has a history older and denser than anything I could have known. The City of Newcastle’s Waratah Heritage Walk acknowledges the Awabakal people as Traditional Custodians of the land and waters in the area, and the suburb’s colonial history carries the usual layers of naming, subdivision, industry, railway, church, school, hospital and domestic settlement that sit under the apparently simple fact of a birthplace. That is the strange thing about being born somewhere: a baby enters a place as total present tense, but the place has already been accumulating centuries of meaning. I was new. Waratah was not.
Newcastle itself gives the year a particular cast. It was not an abstract Australian city but a working coastal-industrial place, a port city, a television-news place, a city of roads, hospitals, local bulletins, steel memory, suburban houses, churches, railway lines and ordinary rooms. Somewhere around that first year, my father, Matteo, was working in television news — WIN News, as I understand it — which means the world around me was not merely domestic but broadcast. Cameras, edits, deadlines, presenters, local events, road incidents, sport, councils, storms, missing persons, police tape, regional authority, the nightly transformation of place into story: all of that sits near the first year of my life even though I could not yet distinguish a face from a screen.
My mother was there too, in the more difficult-to-reconstruct centre of it: a young woman, Italian-English by inheritance, working as a translator as I understand it, and moving through the everyday physical reality of children, language, family, domestic strain, paperwork, meals, washing, noise, fatigue and hope. My father carried Italy and Germany in the family line; my mother carried Italy and England; I arrived in Australia inside that compound inheritance, a child born in Newcastle but never only of Newcastle. Languages existed before I did. Countries existed inside the voices before I could understand a single word.
That is probably why I am writing this now. In February 2026 I became a father, and that changed the direction of my attention. It made the first years of my own life feel less blank and more inhabited. Before fatherhood, 1988 could sit there as a neat biographical fact: born in Waratah, NSW. After fatherhood, that same fact became crowded with invisible work. Someone held me. Someone fed me. Someone lost sleep. Someone washed clothes. Someone packed a bag. Someone checked if I was breathing. Someone carried me through rooms that I cannot remember and may never be able to reconstruct. A baby remembers nothing, but a baby is not living in nothing. A baby is living inside other people’s effort.
That is also why leaving social media began to feel like a real decision rather than a mood. The feed had become noise, performance, recoil, argument and empty repetition. Fatherhood made an archive feel more urgent than a feed. I found myself wanting not to explain myself to strangers or chase the daily churn, but to reconstruct the rooms, streets, suburbs, houses, countries, books, songs, screens, meals, lamps, carpet, language, family movement and long prehistory of consciousness. The first year of life is unreachable from the inside, but not meaningless. It is all foundation.
Around that private beginning, Australia was staging one of the loudest public years of its modern life. 1988 was the Bicentenary year, a national commemoration tied to the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, but also a year in which that public story could not be separated from the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The National Museum of Australia frames the opening of New Parliament House within those Bicentenary tensions, not only as celebration but as a moment requiring acknowledgement of what 1788 began for First Nations peoples.
Bob Hawke was Prime Minister, and the country was deep in the long 1980s remaking of public life: modernising, mediatising, smoothing itself into a glossier national image while still carrying older arguments underneath. New Parliament House opened in Canberra on 9 May 1988, with Queen Elizabeth II formally opening the building on Capital Hill; Parliament’s own account describes it as Australia’s first permanent Parliament House since Federation, replacing the provisional building opened in 1927. Canberra was not in my life yet, which is the oddness of it: the city that would later become my main internal city was already receiving one of its defining national buildings while I was a newborn in Newcastle, nowhere near it in memory or identity.
Expo 88 in Brisbane was the other great public spectacle of the year. Queensland State Archives records that World Expo 88 was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 30 April 1988, and the event became part of the transformation of Brisbane’s South Bank and of the city’s self-image. So my birth year had two huge Australian gestures running through it: Canberra presenting a new symbolic centre of government, Brisbane presenting a bright international future-facing festival, and the nation trying to narrate itself in public while unresolved histories pressed against the page.
Italy in 1988 belonged to the late First Republic: Christian Democracy, coalition management, Catholic civic gravity, television culture, party machines, European integration, old institutions and the slow pressure that would eventually crack the whole order open in the 1990s. Francesco Cossiga was President, and the premiership moved from Giovanni Goria to Ciriaco De Mita in April; the official Italian Government record lists De Mita as President of the Council for the government formed in 1988. That Italy was not yet my lived Italy, because my own Italian years were still a decade ahead, but it was already inside the family inheritance: the second pole of the house, the other civilisational weight, the language and cultural density behind the Australian rooms.
The global year around me was immense. The Seoul Olympics ran from 16 September to 2 October 1988, bringing South Korea into a new global image as the Cold War neared its end. The Iran–Iraq War finally moved to ceasefire, with Australia’s Department of Veterans’ Affairs noting that Iran and Iraq agreed to a ceasefire from 20 August 1988 under the UN Iran–Iraq Military Observer Group framework. In December, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 259 people on board and 11 people on the ground; the FBI records the bombing as one of the major terrorism cases of the period. I was an infant in Waratah, entirely dependent and nearly blank from my own future perspective, while the world outside the frame was already moving through endings, ruptures, spectacle and grief.
The games of 1988 were building a language I would later enter with total seriousness. This was the year of Super Mario Bros. 3 in Japan, Mega Man 2, Dragon Quest III, Ninja Gaiden, Altered Beast, Double Dragon II: The Revenge, RoboCop, Chase H.Q. and other titles that show the late-8-bit and arcade worlds refining themselves into sharper forms. None of that could reach me yet as experience. I was not reading manuals, not studying box art, not holding a controller, not learning the difference between Nintendo smoothness and arcade brutality, not yet sitting in any of the later rooms where games would become part of my internal architecture. But the medium was already moving into place.
There is something satisfying about the timing. I was born in the same year that Super Mario Bros. 3 appeared in Japan, which means that one of the central childhood design languages of the next decade was entering the world at roughly the same time I was. The game’s map screens, suits, theatrical framing, clean invention and sheer density of secrets belong to a world I would not consciously touch until later, but that simultaneity still feels right. Childhood was being manufactured somewhere else while I was becoming a child without knowing what childhood was.
Film in 1988 had a similar sense of threshold. Who Framed Roger Rabbit led the worldwide box office, with Rain Man, Coming to America, Big and Crocodile Dundee II also among the major releases, giving the year a public-cinema mixture of animation/live-action hybridity, adult drama, broad comedy, body-swap fantasy and Australian export mythology. Die Hard, Beetlejuice, Akira, The Land Before Time, My Neighbor Totoro, They Live and Willow also belong to that year’s wider film shelf, which makes 1988 feel like one of those years when the next decade’s imagination was already half-visible: cyberpunk cities, industrial towers, suburban ghosts, ancient forests, action architecture, corporate monsters and children moving through loss.
Italy gave 1988 one of the great memory-films: Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, a film about childhood, cinema, return, mentorship, projection, distance and the ache of looking back. That feels almost too precise for this project. While I was a newborn in Waratah, Italy produced a film that would become one of the world’s most famous acts of cinematic remembering: an adult man looking back toward the village, the theatre, the older guide, the lost room of childhood. It is not my memory, but it belongs naturally beside these entries because it understands the same wound: the past as image, the past as projection, the past as something recovered only after it has become unreachable.
Music in Australia in 1988 had its own bright national surface. ARIA’s 1988 singles chart places Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes’ “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” at number one, followed by Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible,” Cheap Trick’s “The Flame,” Billy Ocean’s “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car,” and Taylor Dayne’s “Tell It to My Heart.” ARIA’s 1988 albums chart puts INXS’s Kick at number one, followed by the Dirty Dancing soundtrack and Jimmy Barnes’s Freight Train Heart, which gives the local year a particular mixture of Australian rock confidence, American soundtrack saturation and late-80s radio sheen.
The broader music shelf was stranger and deeper than the charts alone. 1988 was the year of Metallica’s …And Justice for All, Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden, Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Jane’s Addiction’s Nothing’s Shocking, Tracy Chapman’s debut and Morrissey’s Viva Hate. Italy, meanwhile, had Massimo Ranieri winning Sanremo 1988 with “Perdere l’amore,” a song whose grand adult melancholy belongs to a very different musical universe from Australian chart-pop and American college rock. So the year carried several futures at once: stadium gloss, underground abrasion, hip-hop urgency, post-rock delicacy before the term existed, and Italian televised melodrama still operating as a national ritual.
Television in 1988 was also laying down durable forms. In Australia, Home and Away launched on the Seven Network as a rival to Neighbours, and the National Film and Sound Archive describes its 1988 pilot as the beginning of one of Australia’s most recognisable television exports. In Italy, Striscia la notizia began in November 1988 on Italia 1, with Mediaset’s own archive identifying the 7 November 1988 first episode. One country was exporting beachside soap as national soft power; the other was building a satirical news-parody machine inside the Berlusconi television era. Both belong to the same wider shift: television becoming not just a household object but a grammar of national life.
Art in 1988 had its own map-making energy. The 43rd Venice Biennale ran from June to September 1988, with Giovanni Carandente as curator, and La Biennale’s history notes that the edition, titled The Place of the Artist, awarded the Golden Lion to Jasper Johns while the Aperto section named Barbara Bloom best young artist. Australia also sat inside the Bicentennial arts frame, with exhibitions such as the 1988 Australian Biennale, From the Southern Cross: A View of World Art c. 1940–1988, placing Australian art into a larger international conversation. Again there is a useful contrast: a newborn’s life reduced to breath, sleep and feeding, while the public art world argues over nation, place, modernity, authorship and how to arrange the twentieth century.
Books in 1988 were doing the work of memory, danger and myth in their own way. Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda won the Booker Prize, and the Booker’s own account frames it as Carey’s first Booker win in a year also marked by the firestorm around Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Roald Dahl’s Matilda appeared in 1988, giving children one of the great fantasies of intelligence, neglect, rage, reading and secret power. Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum was first published in Italian in October 1988, turning conspiracy, scholarship, esotericism and interpretation itself into an enormous intellectual labyrinth. The baby me in Waratah could not read any of it, but the shelves of the year were already filling with books about belief, family, power, systems, secrets, inheritance and the dangers of stories becoming too real.
Design and architecture in 1988 were unusually symbolic. Australia opened New Parliament House, a building designed not merely as accommodation for government but as a national image, with the structure embedded into Capital Hill rather than placed above it like a detached imperial monument. Parliament’s education materials describe the building as opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 9 May 1988 and as one of the largest Australian building projects since the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. Internationally, MoMA staged Deconstructivist Architecture in 1988, the Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley exhibition that helped fix names such as Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi and Coop Himmelb(l)au into a new architectural story of fracture, distortion and controlled instability. It is a sharp pairing: Australia building a buried democratic monument, MoMA presenting architecture as rupture, and me entering the world without yet knowing what a room was.
Technology in 1988 now feels like an early warning system for the world to come. Steve Jobs unveiled the NeXT Computer in October 1988, the black magnesium cube that would later become part of the deep prehistory of the web and modern Apple systems. In November, the Morris worm became the first major attack on the Internet, with the FBI describing it as the first major Internet attack and the case that produced the first conviction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. So even before the web became public life, the future was already taking shape in two opposed forms: the elegant machine that would help enable networked creation, and the self-replicating program that showed how fragile networked systems could be.
I keep returning to the scale mismatch. A baby’s life is tiny, but a year is enormous. Somewhere in Waratah, I was being held, fed, cleaned, dressed, settled, watched, carried and perhaps photographed, with no idea that Australia was staging its Bicentenary, Canberra was opening its new Parliament House, Brisbane was hosting Expo 88, Italy was moving from Goria to De Mita, Seoul was hosting the Olympics, the Iran–Iraq War was entering ceasefire, Lockerbie was about to become a name of grief, Super Mario Bros. 3 was appearing in Japan, Who Framed Roger Rabbit was bending cinema’s frame, Cinema Paradiso was turning memory into film, INXS was sitting at the top of the Australian album chart, Home and Away was beginning, Venice was asking where the artist stood, Peter Carey was winning the Booker, MoMA was naming a broken architectural future, and the Internet was receiving its first great shock.
The public year was loud, ceremonial, technological, cinematic and unstable. My year was private, bodily, dependent and nearly blank. Both are true. Waratah was first, then Dapto, then Figtree, then West Ryde; Newcastle into the Illawarra into Sydney, a life on the move before the self could notice movement at all. Canberra was not there yet. Italy was not there yet as lived memory, though it was already inside the family inheritance. The self I recognise was not there yet. But the archive had already begun, even if other people were still holding every page. This is not memory yet. This is the light before memory.