The Girlie hates boomers

It’s summertime in Sydney and bloody hot. The flies are back. It’s impossible to eat outdoors. The other night I saw fruit bats in Hyde Park, thousands of them bigger than seagulls, doing stuff I’d never seen before. They swooped down and around one after another, through the trees and low over the pond in front of the war memorial, hitting the water briefly and then ascending again. Fruit bats hunting insects.

I live in fear of a fruit bat shitting on me.

The other night was the Girlie’s birthday. You remember the Girlie? I used to write a bit about her here, and here and here. Anyway it was her birthday, her 19th. I texted her “Happy Birthday” because, being between jobs, she still doesn’t get out of bed much before two in the afternoon.

After work I wandered home along Oxford St to our Paddington pad and said we should go out to celebrate. The Girlie still loves Balmain, so off we went and found a nice little Asian place with a good seafood selection. The Girlie is still a vegaquarian.

Halfway through dinner I realised Martin Scorcese’s Bob Dylan documentary No Direction Home is on the telly.

“Damn,” I tell the Girlie. “I wanted to tape that.”

“Boomer,” she scoffs under her breath.

“Pardon?”

“I hate boomers,” she says. “The sooner they all die the better. I give them thirty years,” she paused. “You’ll probably only last twenty,” she added, looking at the glass of wine in my hand.

The Girlie is an impressionable child. She’s been reading Vice magazine, the “Kill Your Parents” issue. Unfortunately, I find myself in some agreement with her.

I mean when I think about the things I value in life, not a lot of them owe much to the baby boom generation. I think boomers have had a big hand in creating the IT revolution, which arguably has changed our lives more than anything else, but in terms of culture and, you know, exciting stuff, its not to them I look.

To make a very broad generalisation, they produced the worst pop music. The likes of Dylan, The Beatles, The Stones, most of the black R&B guys and girls, most of the drivers behind Motown, are often thought of as boomers. But, except for child prodigies like Little Stevie Wonder, those people were mostly pre-boomers, born during or even before the war.

After that, again generalising broadly, the boomers came onto the scene in force and music went down hill for fifteen years, becoming more and more self-indulgent, all the way to disco and the Bee Gees.

Then the late boomers, my generation, came along to put things back on track. (Yay!)

The term boomer is hopelessly imprecise. Online it is generally used interchangeably with “hippy, anti-war, vegan, feminazi” and word like that. A boomer is your classic long-haired 60s radical.

But the late boomers were the first to really react against that hippy legacy. They were the first generation to proclaim their hate of hippies. They were the punks, born mostly at the very end of the 1950s.

While they still, mostly, managed to enjoy the benefits of a free education, the late boomers missed out on the seemingly endless prosperity and security the early boomers enjoyed. In New Zealand they grew up with Muldoon, were restructured endlessly under Lange and Bolger, entered work around the time of the 1987 stock market crash, or after. Worst of all, they had to listen to their older brothers and sisters rabbiting on about Vietnam and Richard Nixon.

It was hardly a bed of roses. No wonder we spent so much time at the Rumba Bar or the Windsor Castle watching Toy Love or The Scavengers, adopting names like Harry Ratbag and John No-one and striking nihilistic poses.

I explained this to the Girlie. She was unimpressed.

“You’re old, Dad.”

On the way back to the car, I bought the Girlie a gelato, just to prove I was still useful for something, and scanned the trees above us for diarrhic bats. The Girlie asked me to pick up the latest copy of Vice for her if I saw it. It would save her getting out of bed.

Fat chance.