Media: BOOK - paperback, 186 pages
Author: R. Williams
Year: 2019
ISBN: 9781502486608
Publisher: Boom Books

Most people know nothing about what happened in their year of birth. Ron Williams has created a series of 32 year-by-year books covering the period 1939 to 1970, that gives readers details of Australian-related events that occurred during each year.

So what did make news in 1944? In 1944, the Japs in the Pacific and the Nazis in Europe was just about beaten. In Oz the Labour Government delighted in having great war-time powers, and wanted to extend them. It took a referendum to cool them down. Sydney was invaded by rats, and there were lots of Yankee soldiers in all our cities, and a few of them were not hated. Young girls were being corrupted by the Yanks and by war-time freedom, and clergy were generous with their advice to them. Germany was invaded, but that did not stop the Doodlebugs dropping on London.

Each volume in the series describes the happenings that affected people, real people, and is designed to make you remember and wonder at things you'd forgotten or didn't know about. They're also designed to get the older and younger generations talking about the past to rediscover heritage that otherwise would be forgotten. 

Contents:
Meat rationing
Another view of the Yanks
Here is the overseas news
Tobacco "rationing"
Enough regulations to go round
No child labour here
The voice of the middle class
The Daily Telegraph in the news
A second front coming in Europe?
Are Germans goodies or baddies?
D-Day: The invasion of Europe
The referendum is looming
Pilotless planes: Doodlebugs
Vice and girlhood
God's little creatures
Japanese POWs at Cowra
Trains
It's boarding school for you
After the war is over
The Bundy clock
Attitude to modern art
What makes a portrait?
Taken for a ride by manpower
The war overseas
The nation's birth-rate
The end of 1944