Reconstructing the prehistory of my consciousness. Y’know, for fun.
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“Where do I come from? Where am I going?” — Deckard, Blade Runner
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In 1990 I was in Figtree, NSW. I have no photographs that I know were actually taken there that year, so the photographs accompanying this entry are simply some earlier ones of me: close enough to the missing period to show the small person who eventually arrived in Figtree, but not evidence of Figtree itself. I like that, actually. It is more truthful than forcing the archive to behave as though every year has been preserved evenly. Some years leave twenty photographs and a dozen stories. Others leave an address. 1990 is largely an address.
Figtree is the first place-name in this sequence that sounds almost fictional to me. Waratah. Dapto. Figtree. West Ryde. The family line was still moving through New South Wales before Canberra entered the picture, and Figtree sat just southwest of Wollongong beneath the Illawarra escarpment, already a developed suburban centre by the time we were there. The name was literal. For generations, travellers were apparently directed by being told to “turn off at the fig tree,” and the enormous tree became sufficiently associated with the junction that the surrounding locality inherited its name. Westfield Shoppingtown had opened there in 1965 and had been expanded into a major regional centre in 1974. Best of all for this particular reconstruction, the actual fig tree was still standing while I lived there. Disease did not force its removal until 1996.
So there is at least one physical object from my Figtree year that can be recovered with certainty. Somewhere outside the house I cannot remember, while I was being carried through a world I had not yet learned how to retain autobiographically, the old tree was still there. I never consciously saw it. Perhaps I passed it in a car. Perhaps somebody drove beneath it with me asleep in the back. Perhaps we went past it repeatedly. Perhaps not. There is no point manufacturing a memory. The better thing is to leave possibility where memory should be. The tree existed. I existed. For one brief period our timelines overlapped.
Try and imagine it. Not as a lost movie of 1990 suddenly restored in perfect detail, because there is no movie. Imagine instead the tiny radius of a two-year-old life: the ceiling above a bed, fabric close to the face, somebody lifting you, the changing size of adults as they approach, the gigantic scale of chairs and doors, the repeated appearance of food, the incomprehensible fact that people vanish from a room and then return, daylight moving across a wall, television pictures that mean nothing yet, the sound of a car starting, a shopping centre entered from adult height while your own viewpoint remains somewhere near knees and handbags. Imagine learning the world without yet knowing that there is a world to learn. The entire construction project of consciousness is underway, but nobody inside has started keeping minutes.
That is what makes Deckard’s question feel right for this year. “Where do I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got?” In Blade Runner he is thinking about the questions Roy Batty wanted answered before dying, but detached from that scene the words become almost embarrassingly fundamental. Origin. Direction. Duration. Three questions that an autobiography spends its entire length trying to answer after the fact. In 1990 I could answer none of them because I could not yet ask them. I had come from Waratah and Dapto and now Figtree, but those were adult coordinates. I was going to West Ryde, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, the ACT, Italy and many other rooms and streets still hidden beyond the edge of the map. I had no conception of time as something finite at all. The questions already belonged to me. The language did not.
Australia around that little existence was entering one of the defining transitions of the early 1990s. On 24 March Bob Hawke contested his fourth federal election against Andrew Peacock and Labor was returned with 78 House of Representatives seats to the Coalition’s 69, with one independent. It was Hawke’s final federal election. At the same time, the long economic expansion of the 1980s was breaking. The Reserve Bank’s later account describes domestic expenditure peaking in early 1990 and employment beginning a sustained fall around the middle of the year as Australia entered the severe downturn that would dominate the opening years of the decade.
The scale difference is still fascinating to me. Economic history speaks in output, expenditure, employment and recession. Family history experiences the same period through adults looking at bank balances, jobs, rent or mortgage payments, petrol, groceries, bills, whether something can be bought now or needs to wait. A two-year-old receives the final result without seeing the calculation. Food appears. Clothes appear. A bed remains available. Somebody pays for the electricity. Somebody knows where the car needs to go. Somebody finds the new address. The child experiences security as though it were a property of nature when in fact it is being manufactured continuously by other people.
I understand those blank years differently now that I have become a father myself. A very young child can be living an extraordinarily full day while retaining none of it in the form an adult would later call a memory. You can feed someone, carry them, make them laugh, settle them, change them, worry about them, take photographs of them, reorganise an entire day around them, and the person at the centre of all that activity may preserve no accessible scene from it whatsoever. Looking at these earlier photographs now, I do not see an empty consciousness waiting to begin. I see someone whose life was already densely inhabited even though almost all of the recollection belonged to everybody else.
And then there is “Hold On.”
Of everything I researched around 1990, Wilson Phillips’ “Hold On” is the song I want sitting closest to this year. It was released as their debut single on 27 February 1990. By early summer it had displaced Madonna’s “Vogue” at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the breakthrough record for Carnie Wilson, Wendy Wilson and Chynna Phillips; their debut album eventually produced three American No. 1 singles. In Australia, “Hold On” finished at No. 11 on ARIA’s singles chart for the year.
It is such a 1990 record that listening to it now almost seems to summon an entire colour palette. The huge clean vocal harmonies, the brightness of the production, those Californian mountains and beaches in the video, the hair, the denim, the early-1990s optimism before the decade accumulated its later associations. It sits precisely on the seam between the eighties and nineties. The Recording Academy describes the group’s image as a conspicuous departure from the neon excess around them, and the video placed the three women against Venice Beach and the San Gabriel Mountains, singing directly outward into enormous open space.
But what gives “Hold On” its place here is the song itself. Chynna Phillips later explained that she developed its central idea while going through sobriety and thinking about the principle of taking life one day at a time. She drove home listening to Glen Ballard’s backing track, remained in the car with a yellow legal pad and wrote the melody and lyric in roughly an hour. The song eventually earned a Song of the Year nomination for Phillips, Carnie Wilson and Ballard.
There is something almost unbearably appropriate about that song existing in the year I cannot remember. “Hold on for one more day.” Not because I imagine toddler me comprehending it, or even hearing it. I have no evidence of that. The idea is better without pretending. Somewhere in Australia in 1990, radios were playing this enormous song about enduring the present because another day is coming, while my own existence consisted almost entirely of one day becoming another. Wake. Eat. Play. Cry. Sleep. Be carried. Wake again. No long-range narrative. No career. No archive. No retrospective meaning. Just continuation.
Try and imagine “Hold On” leaking out of a radio somewhere near that life. It does not need to have happened for the image to explain something true about the year. Perhaps it is playing in somebody else’s car at traffic lights. Perhaps from a shop while a parent walks past holding my hand. Perhaps through the thin speakers of a television in another room. The song is moving through Australia whether I register it or not. At the exact point where my own chronology is almost completely unavailable to me, one of the biggest records of the year is insisting that time moves forward in increments small enough to survive.
That becomes stranger from 2026. I know the days it was unknowingly carrying me toward. I know there would eventually be thirty-eight addresses in the list. I know there would be Canberra, Italy, computers, drawing, games, films, writing, relationships, work, loss, enormous changes in technology, the web, adulthood, and eventually a child of my own. The two-year-old knows none of that. He only has today. Wilson Phillips could not possibly have been singing to him, but the adult reconstructing him hears the song across thirty-six years and cannot entirely separate it from the child in those photographs. Hold on. There are people you have not met yet. Places that do not exist for you yet. Entire parts of yourself that have not arrived.
The Italian half of 1990 was much louder. Italy hosted the FIFA World Cup, turning the summer into Italia ’90, one of those sporting events that escaped sport and became a complete cultural object: stadium architecture, television graphics, crowds, shirts, mascots, music, cities and the almost delirious emergence of Salvatore “Totò” Schillaci. He entered the tournament having never scored for Italy, initially as a substitute, then scored six times and finished with both the Golden Shoe as leading scorer and the Golden Ball as the tournament’s best player. Italy lost its semi-final to Argentina but defeated England for third place.
There is something lovely about Schillaci belonging to this year too: an obscure player walking into a few weeks that permanently altered how millions of people remembered him. FIFA later quoted him saying that nobody could have predicted what happened. That is another kind of prehistory: the moment immediately before a life changes, when the future identity that will appear inevitable in retrospect does not yet exist. In Figtree I was obviously nowhere near such self-awareness, but everybody has those thresholds. Before you are the person associated with something, you are simply the person before it.
The world beyond Figtree was crossing much larger thresholds. Nelson Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison on 11 February 1990 after twenty-seven years of imprisonment, beginning the next phase of the negotiations and political transformation that would end apartheid. Germany formally reunified on 3 October, less than a year after the opening of the Berlin Wall. Iraq invaded Kuwait on 2 August, beginning the crisis that would become the Gulf War. And on 24 April, Space Shuttle Discovery launched carrying the Hubble Space Telescope, deploying it the following day into orbit.
Hubble is perhaps the public object from 1990 that has aged most beautifully alongside the child in these photographs. It went up before I could form a memory of looking at the night sky and has remained there through almost the entire remembered portion of my life. NASA now records more than 1.7 million observations from the telescope. The first images were compromised by the famous flaw in the primary mirror, but servicing missions eventually corrected its vision. Even that feels strangely compatible with a project about trying to look backwards: an instrument launched specifically to see farther than human eyes could manage, discovering that its first vision was blurred and requiring years of human ingenuity before the picture became clear.
Cinema in 1990 was extraordinary. The American box-office leaders included Ghost, Pretty Woman, Home Alone, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Hunt for Red October, Total Recall, Die Hard 2, Dick Tracy and Back to the Future Part III. Beyond the biggest commercial films were Goodfellas, Edward Scissorhands, Misery, Miller’s Crossing, Jacob’s Ladder, Wild at Heart and The Godfather Part III. Even reading that list now gives 1990 an almost impossible density. Martin Scorsese, Tim Burton, David Lynch, the Coens, Paul Verhoeven, Rob Reiner, John Hughes, Robert Zemeckis: very different filmmakers making films that remain visually and tonally distinct from one another.
There is something particularly fitting about Total Recall appearing in this year even though I rejected its identity quote for the epigraph. The whole film is obsessed with unreliable memory, manufactured identity and the possibility that a person cannot safely reconstruct himself from what appears to be stored in his own mind. Blade Runner, although from 1982, reaches deeper for me because Deckard’s question is broader. He is not simply asking who he is. He is asking where existence came from, where it is moving and how much of it remains. Those are the proper questions for 1990 because I cannot access the year by remembering harder. I have to approach it externally: addresses, photographs, cultural records, maps, songs, release dates, other people’s histories.
Games were simultaneously constructing another world I would later enter. The Game Boy had arrived the previous year, and in Australia Super Mario Land belongs to 1990. In Japan, Nintendo released the Super Famicom in November with Super Mario World and F-Zero, establishing the machine that would become the Super Nintendo elsewhere. Computer games included Lucasfilm’s The Secret of Monkey Island, while the wider year also brought Wing Commander, King’s Quest V, Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon and Ultima VI. Japan saw Final Fantasy III, Dragon Quest IV and the first Fire Emblem. The extraordinary thing is how many different ideas of what a game could be were developing at once: platforming, role-playing, simulation, adventure, conversation, exploration, flight, strategy.
I had no controller in my hands in the memory I possess of 1990 because I possess no 1990 memory at all. But games were already becoming the medium I would eventually recognise as one of the central imaginative languages of my life. That is one of the recurring pleasures of these pre-memory entries: finding things being invented or released before I knew enough to want them. The future does not wait for the self to become conscious. It accumulates inventory.
Australian television supplied one of the great examples. The first series of Round the Twist went to air on Seven in August 1990. The National Film and Sound Archive describes it as an adaptation of Paul Jennings’ stories combining ghosts, slapstick, the grotesque and the absurd around a family living in an old lighthouse. I would encounter that strange Australian imaginative language later, but it was already broadcasting while I lived just down the coast in Figtree. In the United States, Twin Peaks arrived the same year, another series built around a recognisable community becoming porous to something inexplicable. Very different audiences, very different intentions, but the same emerging idea was there: ordinary places are not necessarily ordinary once you look long enough.
The music shelf around “Hold On” makes the year even richer. ARIA’s annual chart puts Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” at No. 1, with MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This,” Madonna’s “Vogue,” Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love,” The B-52’s “Love Shack,” Wilson Phillips’ “Hold On,” Concrete Blonde’s “Joey” and other records now inseparable from the period. Albums released internationally included Depeche Mode’s Violator, Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas, Sonic Youth’s Goo, Pixies’ Bossanova, Megadeth’s Rust in Peace, A Tribe Called Quest’s debut, INXS’s X and Midnight Oil’s Blue Sky Mining. The decade had barely begun and already contained multiple versions of what the 1990s would eventually become.
Still, “Hold On” sits apart for me. Some songs are interesting because they represent a period accurately. Others become useful because the adult listener can place something inside them that was not originally theirs. This one does both. It is unmistakably 1990, but its real function here is to provide an emotional bridge across a year for which I have photographs from nearby but no actual scene. The song speaks in the future tense to someone living entirely in the present.
Books offer almost too perfect an echo. A. S. Byatt’s Possession won the 1990 Booker Prize. Its contemporary scholars reconstruct a secret relationship between two fictional Victorian poets through surviving documents and archival traces. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens also entered the world that year. But Possession belongs closest to this project because its engine is reconstruction: people attempting to recover lives that are no longer directly available through what those lives left behind.
The visual-art world was examining its own archives and hierarchies. In October, the Museum of Modern Art opened High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, examining exchanges between modern art and forms such as comics, advertising, graffiti and other mass visual languages. It seems appropriate to place that exhibition beside a childhood being formed amid television, packaging, record sleeves, shopping centres, film posters, toys and eventually video-game imagery. A person’s visual education does not begin when they enter a gallery. It begins before they know they are looking.
Technology is where 1990 begins to resemble a secret blueprint of the life to come. Tim Berners-Lee had proposed the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989. In November 1990 he and Robert Cailliau submitted the formal WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project, and by Christmas Berners-Lee had written the first browser/editor and server software; info.cern.ch was running as the first web server on a NeXT computer.
The contrast with these photographs is extraordinary. They belong to an analogue family archive: film exposed inside a camera, processed, printed, handled, placed somewhere, moved from address to address and retained because somebody physically kept the object. At CERN, meanwhile, documents were beginning to acquire addresses that could be followed electronically from one machine to another. The web would eventually allow the adult version of the child in those photographs to reconstruct 1990 from Figtree municipal history, archived charts, film databases, NASA records, FIFA material, museum catalogues and digitised documents without leaving a desk. The tool through which I am now rebuilding the missing year was itself taking recognisable working form during the missing year.
That is the peculiar beauty of 1990 for me. I cannot retrieve it internally, so I keep circling it through things that survived outside me. The address says Figtree. The municipal record tells me the tree still stood. The photographs show what I looked like around the blank region without pretending to document it. Election records recover Hawke’s Australia. FIFA recovers Schillaci and those Italian nights. NASA recovers Discovery carrying Hubble upward. CERN recovers a NeXT computer beginning to serve the web. The charts recover Sinéad O’Connor, Madonna, INXS, Midnight Oil and Wilson Phillips. Film restores Goodfellas, Wild at Heart, Edward Scissorhands, Home Alone, Ghost and Total Recall. Television restores Round the Twist. None of these things gives me the missing room.
But perhaps the room does not have to come back.
Somewhere in Figtree, a two-year-old version of me moved through days that felt complete while they were occurring and then disappeared almost entirely from accessible memory. Outside, the enormous fig tree still stood at the junction. The recession was arriving. Hawke was winning his last election. Italy was filling its stadiums. Schillaci was running away after goals with his eyes wide. Mandela was walking free. Germany was becoming one country. Hubble was rising above Earth. Tim Berners-Lee was building the first web browser. Nintendo was launching the Super Famicom. Round the Twist was beginning. Goodfellas and Edward Scissorhands were appearing in cinemas. Wilson Phillips were standing on a mountain singing “Hold On” into the new decade.
And perhaps that song is the closest thing 1990 needs to a photograph. I do not remember hearing it. I do not remember Figtree. I do not remember that house. But I can look at the small person in these earlier photographs and imagine the entire unwritten future sitting invisibly around him. One more day, then another. Figtree would become West Ryde. NSW would eventually become other states, another country, Canberra, thirty-eight addresses, adulthood. The archive would grow large enough that one day I would turn around and start walking backwards through it, asking Deckard’s questions in reverse: Where did I come from? Where was I going? How long had I already been here before I began remembering any of it?
1990 does not answer. It simply holds on.
Addendum
1990 also has a simpler significance: the nineties were my decade. The eighties are ancestry, visual inheritance, things already in motion when I arrived; the nineties are where childhood itself begins to take shape. Even 1990, still almost entirely beyond recall, feels like the first page of the cultural world I would eventually recognise as mine. The games, films, songs, television, toys, computers and visual language of the decade were beginning to assemble around me before I could consciously claim any of them.
One lovely little marker is StarTropics. Nintendo released it for the NES in North America in December 1990, an action-adventure about Mike Jones travelling through tropical islands to find his missing archaeologist uncle, moving between overworld exploration and dungeon-like combat. It was developed by Nintendo R&D3 under Genyo Takeda and, unusually for a Nintendo game created in Japan, was made for Western audiences and never received a Japanese release; Europe followed in 1992. It even came with a physical letter whose hidden message had to be revealed during the adventure, an unusually tactile collision between the object in the game box and the imaginary world on the screen.
I obviously was not sitting in Figtree playing StarTropics in 1990. But I love finding it there at the entrance to the decade anyway: Nintendo, islands, exploration, secrets, strange creatures, a missing person, a kid travelling outward into a larger unknown world. The nineties had begun. So had my decade. I just wasn’t old enough yet to know I had entered it.
