Reconstructing the prehistory of my consciousness. Y’know, for fun.
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“I don’t know who I am. I don’t know where I’m going.” — Jason Bourne, The Bourne Identity
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In 1989 I was in Dapto, NSW, which still feels strange to write because Canberra had not entered my life yet. Not Bowser, not The Causeway, not O’Connor, not the later rooms, bus routes, libraries, beds, screens, carpets, bridges, flats, apartments, work buildings, lake walks, Civic afternoons, southside crossings, or the recurring internal geography of the place that would eventually become the main city of my life. Canberra was still ahead of me, somewhere beyond the next few moves, not yet available to memory, not yet capable of becoming a private map. At this point the family line still ran along the coast: Waratah 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.
I have no memory of Dapto. No house returns. No cot. No lounge room. No kitchen. No front step. No car seat. No mother’s voice in a particular room. No father’s return from work through a particular doorway. No image of my sister beside me in that exact year, although she must have been there, already ahead of me in the world, already turning the place into a childhood more actively than I could. I know Dapto only as an early coordinate, one of those pre-conscious facts a life inherits from records and family movement: 1989, Dapto, NSW, the second year of my life, a suburb before it becomes an image.
Dapto does have shape around the blankness. It sits in the Illawarra, on the western side of Lake Illawarra, near Wollongong, inside that south-coast NSW world of escarpment, water, rail, roads, shops, modest houses and ordinary family logistics. The place itself had already been through several lives before I entered it: Indigenous country, colonial settlement, dairy district, railway town, suburban growth point, and by the late 1980s the sort of Australian place where a young family could exist inside a practical daily radius of shops, roads, work, childcare, television, petrol, groceries and movement.
The photograph helps. Me at a table, small and round-faced, wearing yellow, sitting in a patterned chair beside a soft blue tablecloth, the whole room blurred by age and film stock. It has that late-1980s domestic softness: pale curtains, filtered light, furniture half-dissolved by time, the colours of an ordinary room now made precious by distance. It is not memory exactly. It is evidence. A child paused in the middle of being looked after; a child holding something, sitting somewhere, being seen. There is something almost comic about the seriousness of a baby’s face in an old photograph, as if I am already trying to understand the room, the table, the camera, the adults, the whole arrangement of existence, while also plainly understanding none of it.
That is the odd force of these pre-memory years. From inside the self, they look empty. From the outside, they are crowded with other people’s labour. They are full of hands, errands, routines, meals, washing, lifting, cleaning, soothing, dressing, driving, folding, checking, paying, organising, starting again. The baby remembers nothing, but the adults around the baby are doing almost everything. I know that with a different seriousness now because I became a father in February 2026. Before that, 1989 could sit there as a blank year with a place-name attached. Now it feels inhabited; not remembered by me, but inhabited by care.
There is also a private future folded into 1989, because elsewhere in the world of that year was a person who would one day become central to my adult life. I will not make much public use of that here, because some parts of the family archive should remain quiet by design, but it gives the year an extra domestic charge. My own 1989 is Dapto and infancy and blankness; the larger personal 1989 is also a year in which the future was already being arranged beyond my field of vision.
Australia around that small domestic room was still in the Hawke years. The Bicentennial year had passed, the country was still moving through the long economic and cultural remaking of the late 1980s, and the national screen was full of public confidence, anxiety, reform, sport, ads, news bulletins and the smooth authority of evening television. In June, Bob Hawke’s response to the Tiananmen Square massacre became one of the defining Australian political moments of the year, remembered for the emotional force of his televised remarks and for Australia’s offer of protection to Chinese students after the crackdown. The same year, the Australian pilots’ dispute disrupted domestic air travel and exposed the hard edges of the country’s industrial relations settlement, with aircraft, airports and travel itself becoming part of the national argument.
Italy was also moving inside 1989 as a country still under the long shadow of Christian Democracy, coalition politics, Catholic institutions, television culture, corruption pressure, European idealism and the late Cold War order beginning to crack. Francesco Cossiga was President of the Republic, and Giulio Andreotti’s sixth government began in July 1989, formed as a coalition of Christian Democrats, Socialists, Social Democrats, Republicans and Liberals. In June, Italians voted in European Parliament elections and also in a consultative referendum on giving a constituent mandate to the European Parliament, a very Italian mixture of bureaucracy, idealism and constitutional symbolism, with Europe already pressing forward before the 1990s had properly arrived.
The wider year was immense. In China, the Tiananmen Square massacre became one of the central images of the late twentieth century. In Alaska, the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound and spilled nearly 11 million gallons of oil. In August, Voyager 2 passed Neptune, giving humanity its first close encounter with the eighth planet. In November, the Berlin Wall opened and crowds began dismantling one of the great physical symbols of the Cold War division of Europe. And at CERN in March, Tim Berners-Lee submitted the first proposal for the information system that became the World Wide Web, a quiet technical document that would eventually change the shape of public life, private life, publishing, memory, argument, research, art, shopping, dating, parenting, boredom, loneliness, everything.
That web fact lands strangely from 2026. In 1989, it was a proposal. Decades later, after the long mutation of online life into feeds, platforms, arguments and noise, I find myself permanently returning to the quieter idea of a personal site: a deliberately arranged archive, a room built slowly, a place where the self is not scattered by the daily machinery. The web at its origin still had something of the library in it. I like that this pre-memory project can live there, not as content in the modern sense, but as a set of rooms built out of years.
The games of 1989 were also quietly building the world I would later enter with full devotion. Nintendo launched the Game Boy in 1989, and The Strong Museum of Play describes its success as coming from efficient design, link-cable play and a strong library rather than technical spectacle. Tetris became inseparable from the handheld’s cultural life after Nintendo packaged it with the Game Boy, turning a Soviet puzzle game into one of the cleanest, most portable compulsions in popular culture. Sega released Golden Axe, Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia arrived on Apple II, and SimCity turned urban systems into play, giving the year a strange design spread: handheld intimacy, arcade fantasy, rotoscoped movement, and civic simulation. None of this could reach me yet as experience. I was not choosing cartridges, holding controllers, reading manuals, studying box art, or sitting at a PC in the half-lit room of a later childhood. But the medium was forming around me, piece by piece, waiting for my hands to catch up.
The films of 1989 now look almost absurdly concentrated: Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Ghostbusters II, Dead Poets Society, Back to the Future Part II, The Little Mermaid, Do the Right Thing, Field of Dreams, When Harry Met Sally and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure all belong to the same cinematic shelf. Box Office Mojo lists Batman as the top domestic release of the year, followed by Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon 2, Rain Man and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, which gives the year a very particular late-1980s shine: blockbuster confidence, adventure cinema, family spectacle, movie-star presence, and studio entertainment still speaking in big shared images. In Italy, Nanni Moretti’s Palombella Rossa appeared as a political comedy about amnesia, communism and water polo, which feels almost too perfect for this entry: a film about a man trying to reconstruct identity in a country whose own political identity was about to enter its final pre-1990s convulsions.
Music had the same double quality of gloss and depth. In Australia, ARIA’s 1989 singles chart places Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” Roxette’s “The Look,” The Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles),” The Bangles’ “Eternal Flame,” and Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” among the defining singles of the year; its albums chart puts Traveling Wilburys, 1927, Def Leppard, Fine Young Cannibals and Daryl Braithwaite near the top. In Italy, Sanremo 1989 was won by Fausto Leali and Anna Oxa with “Ti lascerò,” while Paola Turci’s “Bambini” won in the Emerging Acts section, which gives the Italian side of the year a different register again: televised song, formal presentation, melodrama, adult seriousness, the old national ritual of music as broadcast event. Elsewhere, Disintegration, Doolittle, Pretty Hate Machine, Bleach, The Stone Roses and Like a Prayer all entered the broader cultural shelf: pop brightness, college-rock abrasion, industrial unease, goth grandeur, Madchester shimmer, and the first low rumble of the 1990s arriving before the decade itself had technically begun.
And yes, “Obsession” was not actually a 1989 song. The one I was half-remembering, “You are an obsession / you’re my obsession / who do you want me to be…,” was written by Holly Knight and Michael Des Barres, first recorded by its writers in 1983 and then made famous by Animotion in the mid-1980s. That seems right for this entry anyway, because pre-memory is full of exactly that kind of floating cultural debris: songs that belong to one year but are remembered through another, images that detach from their dates, melodies that become household light rather than chronology.
Television in 1989 was undergoing its own change of form. In Australia, Fast Forward began on Seven in April and became one of the major sketch-comedy machines of the late 1980s and early 1990s, drawing on the energy of Melbourne comedy and the fast-cut language of advertising, parody and channel-surfing. In America, Seinfeld first aired its pilot in July, still under the title The Seinfeld Chronicles, while The Simpsons began its half-hour life in December with Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire. In Italy, Rai 3’s Blob began on 17 April 1989, a daily act of meta-television built from montage, repetition, satire and the strange exposure of television by television itself. So while I was pre-verbal in Dapto, television was already learning to quote itself, parody itself, fragment itself, and turn the flow of broadcast culture into an object of comedy and critique.
Art in 1989 was also shifting scale. Magiciens de la Terre opened in Paris at the Centre Pompidou and the Grande Halle de la Villette, and is still treated as one of the pivotal exhibitions in the move toward a broader global contemporary art field, partly because it placed Western and non-Western artists into the same contemporary frame, even as the exhibition has remained heavily debated. That sits strangely beside the domestic photograph of me at the table. In one frame, a baby in Dapto. In another, the art world attempting to redraw its own map. One private archive beginning in a family room; one public archive trying to make room for a wider world.
Books were doing their own deeper work. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day won the 1989 Booker Prize, a novel built around service, restraint, memory, self-deception and the terrible cost of not fully speaking one’s life. Dan Simmons published Hyperion, which went on to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1990. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club appeared, Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards! entered Discworld, and John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany also belongs to that year’s literary shelf. The baby me in Dapto could not read any of it, but the shelves of the world were already filling with books that would later make sense of inheritance, language, duty, belief, family and the strangeness of being formed by stories before choosing any of them.
Design and architecture also left visible marks on the year. I. M. Pei’s Louvre Pyramid was inaugurated on 29 March 1989, turning a controversial glass intervention in a historic courtyard into one of the defining museum entrances of the modern world. Frank Gehry was named the 1989 Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate, before Bilbao made him a household name, at a point when his reputation was already tied to rupture, assemblage, industrial materials and a refusal to let buildings behave politely. That is one of the interesting design tensions of 1989: the old museum given a new glass threshold, the old architectural order beginning to bend into more unstable shapes, and the late twentieth century learning to place sharp modern forms inside inherited space.
Technology is the category that feels most uncanny in retrospect. The World Wide Web began as Berners-Lee’s March 1989 information-management proposal at CERN, with the famous judgement “Vague, but exciting” attached by Mike Sendall. Apple released the Macintosh Portable in September 1989, an expensive, heavy battery-powered machine that looks primitive now and futuristic then, a step on the road toward the portable personal-computing world that would later become ordinary. Nintendo’s Game Boy did the same for games in a smaller, cheaper, more culturally explosive form. Between those objects and that CERN proposal, 1989 contains an early outline of the life to come: handheld screens, portable machines, networked documents, private play, public systems, and the eventual transformation of memory itself into something stored, searched, uploaded, linked, backed up, lost, recovered and rewritten.
I keep returning to the scale mismatch. A baby’s life is tiny, but a year is enormous. Somewhere in Dapto, I was being put in a chair, handed something, photographed, fed, cleaned, dressed, carried, settled and driven around with no idea that Berlin, Beijing, Alaska, CERN, Neptune, Nintendo, Madonna, Ishiguro, Andreotti, Sanremo, Moretti, Batman, Game Boy, Blob, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Magiciens de la Terre, the Louvre Pyramid and the last great flare of the 1980s were all happening outside the frame. The public year was loud and world-historical. My year was private, bodily, dependent and nearly blank. Both are true.
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.
