1956 – The Year Australia Welcomed the World

It was a year like no other, when the world arrived at the nation’s doorstep – it wasn’t just the advent of television and the Olympic Games, but the influx of Hungarian refugees, the British nuclear tests in the arid centre of the country, the legalisation of poker machines in NSW, the cultural innovations of Edna Everage and The Summer of The Seventeenth Doll, book banning, and the important role Prime Minister Robert Menzies played in trying to solve the biggest threat to peace since World War II, the Suez Crisis. Along the way, Australia had an injection of US pop culture, consumerism and cosmopolitanism. Just how ready were we for all of this? And just how much did these social shifts change the country?

Radio National's Phillip Adams remembers 1956 with Nick: listen here.