Media: BOOK - paperback, 190 pages
Author: R. Williams
Year: 2021
ISBN: 9780645182606
Publisher: Boom Books

Born in 1942? is one in a series of year-by-year books that highlight the social history happenings in Australia at that time. So if you'd like to know what happened in the year you were born - you can't get a better book that this.

Arranged chronologically by months, Ron Williams has scoured newspapers, magazines and other sources and has come up with most of the major events that occurred during the year 1942. He presents these happenings in a thoroughly readable book.

Obviously it was during WW2, and it was this year that the nation realised that the Japs were really coming. Governments became Big Brothers and took over almost everything. Men were conscripted, many sent to their death. Everything worthwhile was rationed, boy scouts collected aluminium and iron, all private boats and yachts were seized by the navy. Jazz was giving way to crooners, Saturday horse racing was almost off the calendar, Test cricket had gone, beer was very hard to get, and houses and cars were blacked out at night. Worst of all, the Japs were getting ever closer, and it seemed certain that Australia would fall to them.

Each volume in this series describes the happenings that affected people, real people, and is designed to make you remember and wonder at things forgotten. The books might just let nostalgia see the light of day, so that oldies and youngies will talk about the past and rediscover a heritage otherwise forgotten.  Hopefully, they will spark discussions between generations, and foster the asking and answering of questions that should not remain unanswered.

Contents:
Preface to this Series
Introduction
The Advancing Japs
Evacuation of school children
Plight of enemy aliens
Australia in mid-February
Scorched earth policy
The European scene
Curtin and Churchill
Curtin's speech
The darning needle really is here
The half-time score
Can we avoid invasion?
The Aussie front
Introduction of clothes rationing
Curtin's tough month
Troubles in New Guinea
Crooning and jazz
Smoking in trams
Sttute of Westminster
Behind ratificaion of the statute
A national government - again
Japanese propaganda
The growth of the resistance
We survived our toughest year