Yep

... 13 blocks of wonderful old integrated mixed-use areas, and it, they built this massive Twin Tower.

So this, this was the ultimate belief in progress by Austin Tobin, um, the man who was so powerful in New York that he, he managed to get his will imposed.

Um, and so we had this expression of progress and power that collapsed, um, in terrible circumstances.

So it seemed to me to be, you know, a, a really, um, key metaphor in a way for what the book was talking about.

A, a terrible one, but it really, it really, um, encapsulated, you know, that story.

But since then, of course, y- you're right, Dennis.

Yeah.

How did you go about finding the stories that are in the book? Well, I drew, I

mean, I think every author, you know, you draw inevitably from your own experience, don't you? You know, but I really wanted to draft a history of this, initially this story belief in the utopia of suburban life so there was this belief that in a suburban utopia that everybody could go and have their own house their backyard garden and how that suburban utopia gradually got altered so that now we're finding high rise apartments everywhere and the city that we once lived in and enjoyed is changing quite rapidly and So I really traced that series of events and really central to it was the change in the 60s, wasn't it? So the 60s was the beginning of this disruption when the Vietnam War really meant a lot.

It really upended so many accepted norms, didn't it? The belief that governments would always be honest and that they would look after their people.

And then we had all the student riots in 1968 all over Europe.

And then the awful economic upsetting times of the 70s when we had inflation.

And so I traced the book through a series of characters who were born after the war and their parents and their families and showed how they moved through all these really major events and how their ordinary lives were affected by them and how they gradually changed from this period of optimism to increasing doubt and questioning of everything they were told.

It would be a pile more work, but are there any regrets that you perhaps haven't continued on from that point till now? Because, gosh, there have been some changes.

There have been, and I chose 2001 because that was the time of the Twin Tower attack.

Why does the Prime Minister believe it's the right thing to do to plow this money in?

Hard to, hard to believe it isn't a political decision to try to, um, satisfy J- Jacinda Ardern because there's no, there's no sense to it.

It doesn't add up on any grounds at all.

So why, why other than a political decision? Um, I mean, if Mr.

Albanese wants to give public transport in Melbourne some more money, why doesn't he put money into, into the outer suburbs where, you know, we've seen in the last couple of weeks the terrible situation of trying to cram commuters onto country trains, right? Now we know that isn't, isn't working.

We've, we've got a million more people gonna go into these outer suburbs with shocking public transport, and yet they're plowing money into this unviable suburban rail loop.

It, it just doesn't make sense.

I think you're right, Professor, that it makes sense in the context of the fact that Anthony Albanese is trying to g- give a hand to Jacinda Ardern in the lead up to the state election.