Photo: Esther Collings and her husband Ronald were Australia’s oldest living couple in 2018.

Globally, 99% of people born between 1930 and 1946 have passed to the other side. If you were born in this period, your ages range between 77 and 93 years old (a 16-year age span) then you are one of the rare surviving one-percenters. You are the smallest group of children born since the early 1900s.

You are the last generation, climbing out of the depression, who can remember the winds of war and the impact of a world at war that continued to rattle the structure of our daily lives for years.

You are the last to remember ration books for everything from tea to sugar to shoes. You diligently saved tin foil and poured fried meat fat into cans.

You can remember milk being delivered in glass bottles to your home early in the morning and placed in the milk box at the front door. Discipline was enforced by parents and teachers. You are the last generation who spent childhood without television and instead, you imagined what you heard on the radio.

With no TV, you spent your unleashed childhood playing outside. You were left to wander as crime was insignificant and risks to children other than falling out of trees or swimming accidents were virtually unknown. If you fell, a stranger comforted you, a neighbor bandaged you and made sure you got home.

You likely raided orchards for apples, plums, pears and much of what you ate was grown or you caught, killed and ate it. There were few playgrounds for kids. The lack of television in your early years meant that you had little real understanding of what the world was like.

We got a black-and-white TV in the late 50s that had 3 stations and no remote. Telephones (if you had one) were one to a house and hung on the wall in the kitchen (who cares about privacy).

Computers when they finally arrived were called calculators; they were hand-cranked. Typewriters were driven by pounding fingers, throwing the carriage, and changing the ribbon. INTERNET and GOOGLE were words that did not exist.

Newspapers and magazines were written for adults and your dad would give you the comic pages after he read the news. The news was broadcast on your radio in the evening. The radio network gradually expanded from 3 stations to thousands.

New highways would bring jobs and mobility. Most highways were country lanes, single carriage or two lanes and there were no Motorways. You went downtown to shop. You walked to school. Your parents were suddenly free from the confines of the depression and the war, and they threw themselves into working hard to make a living for their families.

You weren’t neglected, but you weren’t today’s all-consuming family focus. They were glad you played by yourselves. Parents were busy discovering the postwar world. The only people who travelled were servicemen and seamen.

You entered a world of overflowing plenty and opportunity; a world where you were welcomed, and enjoyed yourselves. You felt secure in your future, although the depression and poverty were deeply remembered. Polio was still a crippler. Everyone knew someone who had it.

You are the last generation to experience an interlude when there were no threats to our country. World War II was over and the cold war, terrorism, global warming, Covid-19 and perpetual economic insecurity had yet to haunt your life.

Only your generation can remember a time after WWII when our world was secure and full of bright promise and plenty. You grew up at the best possible time, a time when the world was getting better.

More than 99% of you are retired now, and you should feel privileged to have ‘lived in the best of times!’ If you have already reached the age of 77 years old, you have outlived 99% of all the other people on this planet. You are a 1% ‘er!