Thanks to Andrew, who is answering almost all of the JuneQuestions this month for inspiration to answer today’s.
I am grateful for the social change that has happened in my lifetime.
I benefited from the tail end of the Whitlam government’s fee-free tertiary education policy. It lasted just over a decade. People who could not have afforded higher education, who were first in family, rural (hi!) not only started enrolling in university courses. They found out that they could do just as well in the environment as people born to it. Which meant maybe… just maybe… other venues that excluded us were not impenetrable either?
[Portrait of Henri Groulx. Libraries and Archives of Canada http://central.bac-lac.gc.ca/.redirect?app=fonandcol&id=3194087&lang=eng 
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When I walk down the street, enter enclosed rooms, ride on a bus, travel in an aeroplane I am not now constantly covered by a cloud of someone else’s cigarette smoke that makes my asthma flare so that I cough nonstop. It is very, very rare that I even see anyone smoking in public now.
My aunt was a school teacher who worked for the state education department in the 1960s. She earned far less than male school teachers doing identical jobs. She married. She lost her permanent job. Had to resign. As all female teachers who married did.
Until 1985, in the state I lived in, a woman could be forced to have sex without consent by her husband and THERE WAS NO LEGAL PENALTY. Rape was only criminalised if you were not married to the victim.
When I look across the rooftops out my window, more than half the rooves have solar panels on them, generating renewable energy.
The faces of people I pass on the streets are not only white, white, white, white. Models advertising products on buses that drive past are not only white, white, white, white. Newsreaders, politicians, Supreme Court judges, professional colleagues, are not only white, white, white, white. Growing up in an Australian country town, at the time I did, was a very white, white, white, white experience. One better left in the past.
Not every societal shift over time has been wonderful. We really DID leave our houses and cars unlocked in the country. And we COULD run off and spend the day playing with kids outside on the street, turning up at each others’ houses for dinner, with everyone more or less watching out for everyone elses’ kids.
But, some changes have made the world a very different, and better, place; one that ten year old me could not have imagined.