2 hours ago
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March 29, 2026 — 5:00am
For some of us it’s a bit rattling to know 40 calendar years have elapsed since 1986. Let’s not pretend 1986 feels like yesterday, but 40 years?
In 1986, I was turning 14. In the first week of school a kid in my woodwork class confided, with a bloodshot smile, that he was stoned. He encouraged me to join him before class, next time. Petrified I’d be zombified like the girl in Go Ask Alice – a flick shown to us in 1985, made in 1973, about the dangers of peer pressure, pills and wearing flares – I told him I’d prefer to wait until my birthday. The slippery ploy worked. Remembering things was no longer a strength of his.
In 1986, I received my first love letter. All in green, her handwriting looked like choppy winter waves. After reading it 26 times, still astonished, I hid it for some unfathomable reason, between my bed and the wall. Its unexplained disappearance is something my mother might shed light on, but she’s 80 in May, and raising it might be churlish. Alas. Katrina from Rosebud had coffee-brown eyes, a wicked attitude, and a mole like Madonna’s. Did I write back? The enduring shame.
In 1986, Soviet-aligned Libya (that is, its secret service) bombed a nightclub in West Berlin. This was a moment. We’d grown up with the idea that a nuclear apocalypse was not implausible. When the US bombed Libya in response, I remember feeling perverse relief, as if a pressure valve had opened. Somebody, somewhere, had got something out of their systems. Safe in Australia, a skirmish in Libya felt preferable to something global.
What became of all those dismantled nuclear warheads, enough to incinerate every organism? And how are we doing now? When do we start dismantling again, and may I lend a hand? Have passport.
In 1986, my mother had joined People for Nuclear Disarmament. On our kitchen wall was a mock movie poster. Fronting a mushroom cloud and blinding flash, Ronald Reagan cradled Margaret Thatcher, a la Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. She promised to follow him to the end of the Earth. He promised to organise it. GONE WITH THE WIND. The most explosive love story ever told. My mother even persuaded me to join her on a march: sunny, easy-going. Nobody bashed.
As a rule, 1986 was staunchly conformist. At school, on casual clothes days, the guys looked like Happy Days extras: crew cuts, flat-tops, navy jeans and white T-shirts. Dire Straits, Top Gun and Robert Palmer were in. My friends and I regarded that as a sick and sorry joke.
Our peers knew us as the Headbangers. Let’s say we were underappreciated. Our denim jackets were emblazoned with back patches heralding our spurned religion’s many sects: Megadeth, Dio, Motley Crue. Coming and going, we saluted one another with the pointer and pinkie signal and one word: “metal!”
In 1986, a friend and I were barred from the school snow camp as punishment for misbehaving. For a week, while my peers were having snowball fights at Mount Buller, I was home alone watching Channel Ten’s Eyewitness mid-morning news, read by David Johnston. Eyewitness ran stories on whatever the ridiculous Andrew and Fergie were up to, and freak tornadoes in America’s Midwest, replete with muffled screams. Nourishing stuff.
Afternoons, my fellow pariah showed up on his minibike. We burnt up the roads, shouting “F--- the Snow!” He spent his mornings where he normally spent the first hour after school: shovelling manure in the stables behind Racecourse Road. Sucker.
In the weird world of 1986, a friend and I went to the grand final after my PE teacher sold us standing room at $10 each. The teacher was American and didn’t understand Aussie Rules. (Bizarrely, he had a brother-in-law in Air Supply.) On that red-letter Saturday, in the coliseum, my mate and I found ourselves wedged behind a pylon the width of a granny flat, blocking approximately 44 per cent of the playing surface. Given my team’s mauling, that was merciful. Leaving early, wending our way through one of the carparks, my friend said: “I can’t believe you’re not way angrier. If my team played like that, I’d at least pull a mirror off one of these cars.”
True to form in ’86, I just couldn’t make the leap.
James Hughes is a freelance writer.
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