I Was a Teenage Bureaucratic Ghost: Lost in the Tech Gap of Australian History
Let me set the scene. Melbourne, 1976. A girl in a Melbourne Girls' Grammar uniform, ponytail flying, heart in full swoon over her first boyfriend, walks out of class and heads to her after-school job at Petty’s Newsagency. She's stacking Woman’s Day and The Truth like a teenage origami prodigy, inhaling newsprint and dreaming of Mark Holden. That girl? Me. That life? Very real. But according to Australia’s current digital record system?
See, I’m applying for my Resident Return Visa (RRV), which
involves proving that I once lived, loved, studied, worked, and probably
overused Impulse body spray in Australia. But here’s the catch: because I lived
my formative years before the Great Scanner Enlightenment of the late 90s, none
of it counts. To today’s system, if it wasn’t scanned, it didn’t happen. I am a
bureaucratic ghost. I am Schrödinger's citizen.
From the late 70s through the glorious,
perms-and-synth-filled 80s, I was catching trams with friends, going to school,
working weekends at the Honey Pot Health Food store (where we pretended carob
was delicious), and using every spare dollar to buy Frampton Comes Alive—which,
yes, I blasted until my parents begged me to try the new miracle called
“headphones.” And all of that? Wiped from the historical record. No tax file
trace. No school archives. Just a wistful breeze where my existence used to be.
I emailed the ATO for proof of my employment history and got
a friendly reply that roughly translated to: “Yeah nah, love. We binned that
in ‘94. Cheers.”
But I was there. I ate Vegemite on toast every morning. I
watched Countdown religiously and Hey Hey It’s Saturday like it
was my second religion. I tore pages out of magazines, hung up band posters
before anyone had a Wikipedia page, and had a schoolbag full of pens that
didn’t work and half-melted Lifesavers. I can still smell the eucalyptus from
schoolyard trees and the yeasty cloud of the old South Yarra brewery drifting
across the suburbs like a warm beer hug.
My records? They fell into the Technology Gap Abyss™,
a bureaucratic Bermuda Triangle for people born before 1980. Not digitized. Not
archived. Not real. We’re the analog ghosts of Australia’s memory banks,
wailing into the cloud, “We were real! We had mood rings and blue
eyeshadow!”
So now, for my RRV, I offer:
- Crumpled
passport pages resembling Dead Sea Scrolls
- Letters from people who still remember Concerts at the Myer Music Bowl
- School
photos featuring blazers, flyaway fringe, and questionable eyebrow choices
It’s funny, isn’t it? In my twenties, back in the 80s, I was
doing what you're supposed to do—studying, working, thriving, figuring out life
between cassette tapes and part-time jobs. But now? I have to convince a
faceless algorithm that my very existence is more than a formatting error.
What I wish the Department of Home Affairs could understand
is this:
The 70s and 80s may not have left digital breadcrumbs, but they left something
much more enduring—my connection to the country that raised me, shaped me, and
still pulls me home. From lifelong friendships to the rhythm of the arts world
my mum helped build, to the eternal Australian truth that a sausage roll and a
ginger beer can fix just about anything.
No, I don’t have my 1979 tax assessment. But I can give you
a guided tour of every Melbourne record shop I haunted, every suburb I lived
in, and why the first bite of a Freddo Frog will always make me cry just a
little.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go dig up another photo
of myself wearing a school uniform and looking mildly confused by the 20th
century.
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