The Boomer Legacy

Site Rationale

“The Boomer Legacy” project uses photographs, text and diagrams to satirise the impacts of the Baby Boomer generation. Launched in January 2013 and with over 355K page–views to date, the project is maintained without any external funding in its author's spare time.

The point here?… That images are a potent form of history, and history will not be kind.

Every image has at least one subtext. For some it's obvious and for others less so. A handful even feature multiple themes — these can typically be found in the favourites section.

The project is pitched at a hypothetical person who wants to look back at our time and get a feel for what things were like. Did we know what we were doing? (Yes) We we aware how bad things were getting? (Yes) Were we worried for the future? (Maybe for our own grandchildren, but otherwise — no).

Boomer Details

The project assumes the “Boomer” generation is defined demographically (ABS, 2004) to be limited to the period following WW2 when the sustained average total fertility rate was greater than 3.0 babies per woman:

More specifically, Australian boomers are those who were born between Q1 1949 and Q3 1964:

Graph data is derived from: ABS Historical Population (ABS, 2019).

Note that other countries define their boomer generation slightly differently.

The USA, for example, start their boom earlier in 1946 because they use the number of births per 1000 population instead of total fertility rate (CDC, 2012). Alternatively some suggest the demographic definition of boomers is far too generic (eg. Menand, 2019), arguing that boomers were more of a cultural phenomenon and thus birth–date ranges are irrelevant.

Project Themes

Ideas & Inspiration

In 1987, after studying and working full–time during my late teens and early 20s, I took a gap–year and spent it pursuing various hobbies. Afternoons would typically be in the Mitchell Library Reading Room, pouring over bound copies of the New York Times newspaper from 1921 up to Black Tuesday 29 Oct 1929.

I wondered if anyone had any idea what was coming (The Crash, The Great Depression etc.) — amazingly, they didn't. I spent at least a couple of months reading through a mountain of optimistic material, which kept reassuring everyone that progress was assured and the good times were here to stay.

Around the same time I also read Frederick Lewis Allen's (1931) Only Yesterday, an informal history of the 1920s written while it happened. I was also going through AJP Taylor's (1974) The First World War: An Illustrated History and fascinated by his ironic use of mismatched photograph captions. Finally, I was so annoyed by the 1929 Bankrupt Investor posed photograph that I became determined to create something authentic.

Weave it all together and after a couple of false–starts, in 2013 The Boomer Legacy was born.

Three Aspects

A. 585 photographs
B. The accompanying captions & commentary
C. The software engineering to make it all work

The main problem with photography is that it is a superficial medium. People can argue over Aesthetics or Light or Colour Science, but ultimately a photograph is just a 2D representation. Yet I wanted to take things further, where the surface image was only one component of what was going on. As mentioned earlier, it's the subtext that matters.

The text which accompanies the images is, for me, the hardest part. You have to get the tone right and yet get the point across without being flippant or didactic. Am constantly having to tweak sentences or rewrite entire sections to make things clearer.

Finally, the software engineering adds an extra dimension. There are plenty of good photographers and writers, but it's hard to combine the two and write thousands of lines of optimised (PHP8 & SQL) code to make an online project work.