The Year Everything Changed: 2001

by Phillipa McGuinness

On New Year's Eve 2001, with her husband by her side, Phillipa McGuinness buried her son. They stood with a young priest in Chua Chu Kang Cemetery and watched a small coffin go into the ground. Later that night, shattered, they sat looking out at the hundreds of ships waiting to come into port in Singapore's harbor. Or trying to leave, who could tell? Each of them thinking about the next year, starting within hours. Phillipa wanted time to push on, for 2001 to be over, but she was also scared. What might be next?

2001 was an awful year. It's the only year where you can mention a day and a month using only numbers and everyone knows what you mean. But 9/11 wasn't the only momentous event that year. In Australia a group of orange-jacketed asylum seekers on deck the Norwegian vessel Tampa seemed responsible for Prime Minister John Howard's statement not long after: 'We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.' These words became his mantra during the bruising election that followed in November, both sides of politics affected by their venom and insularity, or their strength and resolve, depending on which way you looked at it.

The year had started with what was supposed to be a celebratory event of sophistication and nuance, reflecting the kind of country we hoped we had become. Yet the Centenary of Federation on 1 January turned out to be a class-A fizzer. The nation seemed to decide that what was really worth commemorating wasn't the peaceful bringing together of colonial states into a Commonwealth but the doomed assault on a Turkish beach that happened fourteen years later in 1915. It is easier to animate young men dying than old men signing a constitution.

2001 marked the halfway point of twenty years of continuous economic growth in Australia. But the year started with shiny tech startups continuing their implosion following the dotcom bubble burst. The deal of the (nascent) century, the merger between Netscape and AOL, seemingly an all-powerful mega corporation, began to slide. Yet perhaps the digital world as we now know it did start in 2001, at least for what is now the most powerful company in the world. For this was the year that Google, in no hurry to launch an IPO, received its PageRank patent, assigned to Larry Page and Stanford University. The rest, as they say, is history. Apple launched the iPod in 2001, not only transforming the soundtrack to our lives but shifting cultural alignments so that distributors became the richest guys in the room, rather than the artists writing, singing and playing the songs.

If 2001 were a movie - oh wait, of course it was - its tagline might be 'The year that changed everything'. And that change is not over.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics, War

400 pages, Paperback

Published May 28, 2018

Reviews

[Karen ⊰✿ · Rating 4 out of 5]

A non-fiction Australian book about the events of 2001 intertwined with a story of personal trauma. Yes, this is a niche book! But a great one.
I was given a copy by the author's husband - who I know through my business - and I'll admit to being a little hesitant to start it. "What happens if I don't like it?" or worse... "What happens if I can't finish it?!" were thoughts running through my head, but they ended up completely unfounded as I found this an absolutely enthralling read.
There really was SO MUCH that happened in 2001 which has changed our world completely, and I'm not just talking about the obvious (9/11). Each chapter is a month of the year and the amount of research that McGuinness must have completed is mind boggling. At the beginning we learn that the author buried her son - watching a small coffin go into the ground in a country that is far from home. It isn't again until the end of the book that we are taken back into the Author's world of grief, and by then I was more ready for it. Perhaps because I ended up purchasing the audible version (which she deftly narrates), but I really felt like I knew McGuinness by this point and as difficult as it is for me to ever read anything about suffering of children or tragic deaths of children, I found I was able to do so with empathy and tears rather than discomfort and pain.
A fantastic read, well written and narrated, and recommended to anyone interested in current affairs, and our recent history.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Due to some cosmic coincidence, I started reading The Year Everything Changed: 2001 right after Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a novel which, as one Goodreads reviewer noted, is “based heavily in our transition from 1990’s affluence and innocence and relative ease, into the early 2000’s height of terrorism and anxiety”.

The year 2001 was a turning point. As the preface for this book points out, “It’s the only year where you can mention a day using only numbers and everyone knows what you mean.”

Phillipa McGuinness also had a deeply personal reason to remember 2001. In January of that year she had a miscarriage, and on New Year’s Eve, 31 December 2001, she buried her son Daniel. A commissioning publisher, McGuinness got the idea for this book many years later, recalling all the times she’d heard people say, “Oh, everything changed since 9/11”, or “Since 2001…” She mused that the as-yet-uncommissioned writer would explore if everything did, in fact, change:

“But remembering Daniel stopped me in my tracks. Jesus, 2001 was the worst year of my life. Did it change everything for me? I didn’t know, but in a moment heart-stopping and exhilarating at once, I resolved to write this 2001 book myself.”

From this starting point, McGuinness provides a month-by-month recap of the key events, both domestic and international, of 2001, weaving in her own experiences during that pivotal year.

The book starts off innocuously enough with an overview of the “fizzer” of the Centenary of Federation, an analysis of then-Prime Minister John Howard’s curious fixation with cricketer Don Bradman, and a quick spin through the technologies which emerged in 2001. As McGuinness notes, “the first few months of 2001 seem part of a different era”.

By May, events start to speed up, as the reader senses the looming shadow of the Twin Towers. In that month, a series of revelations about the sexual abuse of children rocked the Church. McGuinness covers these events — the fallout from which is continuing to this day — then provides a thoughtful discussion of the aftermath of 9/11 as believers and non-believers alike struggled to make sense of the attack.

By August, events are converging even faster, as McGuinness writes:

“We’ve come to the part of 2001 where so much happens that were it a novel, its author would be criticised for over-plotting. Cut out one terrorist attack, one election, one war, one maritime crisis, please, pleads her overwhelmed editor. There are so many villains, where are your heroes? And why don’t you consider a happier ending?”

But much as we’d like to, we can’t rewrite history. McGuinness details Australia’s shameful history of detaining refugees, and the events that led up to “Children Overboard” — “a name that requires mental scare quotes with every utterance” — when Prime Minister Howard falsely claimed that Indonesian asylum-seekers threw their children into the sea. She supplements her extensive research with many interviews which provide some details about these events which weren’t made public at the time, during the bitterly contested 2001 Federal election. (Her interview with John Howard on the “Children Overboard” incident provides a tacit admission so jaw-dropping that I had to re-read it to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood.)

McGuinness argues that the events of August 2001 fundamentally changed “the way we saw ourselves and the way the world saw us back”. She then outlines other present-day changes which flow from that month: the increased politicisation of the military and militarisation of border security, as well as the ongoing fate of a different group of refugees — the hundreds of men, women and children currently housed in “immigration detention facilities” on Manus Island and Nauru. (Hours after I wrote this sentence, a cartoonist at The Guardian’s Australian edition pointed out that there are children of asylum seekers who were born on Nauru and who have lived there their entire lives.)

McGuinness provides a brief account of the 9/11 attacks, including some heartbreaking stories of the heroism displayed on that day, and her own reactions as, six months pregnant, she watched the crisis unfold on her television screen half a world away.

By a quirk of fate, Prime Minister John Howard was in Washington on 11 September 2001. The following day, in what journalist Paul Kelly described as a “masterstroke”, Howard visited the U.S. Congress, receiving a standing ovation. That same day, he invoked the ANZUS Treaty, for the first time in its existence, thus plunging Australia into war with Afghanistan — less than two months before the 2001 Federal election. McGuinness skilfully untangles the complex responses of the West to the attacks, and the motives of the U.S. alliance for going to war.

She devotes much of the next chapter to the Federal election, or more specifically the effect of Australia’s refugee crisis on the outcome, which saw the Liberal party returned to power with an increased majority of 14 seats. As McGuinness puts it, “The Centenary of Federation slogan ‘Australia — it’s what we make it’ was starting to sound like a threat as much as a promise.”

Trying to answer the question posed by the title of her book, McGuinness notes that, while the crawl of news headlines at the bottom of our television screens existed before 9/11, they were only unfurled during emergencies. But now that we live in a permanent emergency, they have never disappeared. Looking back from now to then, she adds:

“If it were accurate, prioritising the most important breaking news, the hysterical ticker running across the bottom of our screens should have run headlines like these, nonstop, through 2001: Planet in crisis. Bush reneges on 1997 Kyoto Protocol, puts world in danger… IPCC report by hundreds of scientists shows climate change is real. Howard… rejects criticism of climate change policy. Bush wins on oil exploration in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge... Great Barrier Reef in peril. One hundred Nobel Laureates sign appeal criticising Bush’s climate change policies. US losing status as a world leader in climate science.”

Perhaps the last word in hindsight should go to Kim Beazley, who served as Australian Ambassador to the United States from 2010 to 2015, and told the author “You can draw a line back from Trump to the world turning politically on its axis in 2001.”

As its title implies, The Year Everything Changed: 2001 is an ambitious book, packed with facts, figures, anecdotes, insights and theories. While it’s extensively researched and documented, its scope makes it, at times, dense. I felt that the book would have been more readable if McGuinness had focused on fewer themes — but then again, 2001 was a momentous year.

[Aidan EP · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an incredibly moving read delivered in an emotionally gripping and attention-holding narrative non-fiction format. I really appreciated that McGuinness weaved her own life experiences, recollections and biases through the book - it made it much more approachable and made the history feel so much more real.

Two sections in particular really affected me. The first was the September chapter. 9/11 has always affected me - I think part of it is that it was happening while I was being born. My mum went into labour on the 7th of September, 2001. I wouldn't actually be born until the 13th, so my mum watched the whole thing on a hospital TV in between contractions. The other, probably bigger part of it, is that it is aboslutely horrifying. The images and stories that have come out of that terrible day are some of the most disturbing things I have ever seen or heard; and McGuinness I believe tackles that with sensitivity and without resorting to being gratuitous - while also ramming home how horrendous it was on a human level.

The second hard-hitting section was the chapter on December, about McGuinness' late-term miscarriage. The description of her grief is immensely moving, and left me shaken. I think part of that was also related to thinking about my own traumatic birth, and how that could have easily ended much worse for all parties involved. But mostly it is down to her skill as a writer in conveying what are really traumatic, personal experiences to a reader who wasn't there.

Overall, I really enjoyed this visceral account of the year that was 2001 - the year that everything changed for me in that it was when I was born. Her thesis that it was a pivotal year is well argued and convincing, and in the end I can say nothing other than if you want a quick and rapturious read, pick up this book!

[Avril · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating. So much happened in 2001 and I don’t think the world has yet recovered. Years might be artificial markers of time, but thee was a lot packed in to 2001. I remember it as the year of Tampa and the Tampa election that saw John Howard win a third term as Prime Minister. I think Australian politics changed in that election, or reverted back to what it had been before Whitlam. Suddenly racism and religious intolerance were acceptable in Australia’s political discourse again.

The chapter I found most moving was December, in which McGuinness writes about the stillbirth of her son Daniel. Possibly an example of the ‘one death is a tragedy’ rule, but maybe because I’ve conducted the funeral of a stillborn baby and know a little about how much death when people have been preparing for new life hurts.

[Janine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book and its interweaving of the personal and the political. It is very much a mainstream left-leaning analysis (think The Monthly or Saturday Paper) I read it more as commentary than history, and I think that its 2018 presentism will render it outdated within a few years. Nonetheless, for now, it’s a good read that ranges across a huge amount of territory in an engaging way.

For my complete review, see
https://residentjudge.wordpress.com/2...

[Nahum Hall · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was very disappointed. I started reading this book after hearing an interview with the author who had undergone something during 2001 that we experienced several year later. After wading through 280 pages of the author's views I finally got to the short section in question. It turned out that we did not have as much as in common as I anticipated.

[Carolin Window · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is history at its most personal, wise and humane.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

This well written and thoroughly researched overview of the many significant events of 2001 was both informative and easy to read. I particularly liked the way the author reflected on how events such as Tampa and 9/11 have reverberated through Australia's society, changing our attitudes and freedoms, generally for the worse.