It’s often said that the past is a foreign country, and the more distantly it recedes, the more alien it becomes. However, just like a foreign country you’ve visited, there are typically images, terms, sounds, smells and other visceral prompts that will evoke direct personal associations with certain periods in time. For some, it’s about music, for others, sporting events. For me — as a keen student of history — any mention of the tumultuous year 1968, for example, instantly conjures up memories of student revolution in Paris, Russian tanks in Prague and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Nominate 1969 and I’ll automatically think of Neil Armstrong’s one small step in the lunar dust; 1975 and it’s the Whitlam dismissal, with Norman Gunston up there…
