WINNER of the 2020 Ernest Scott Prize for History

Shortlisted for the 2020 NSW Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction

Australian Book Review's Books of the Year 2019
(read more here)

In1970 homosexuality was illegal, God Savethe Queen was our national anthem and women pretended to be married to accessthe pill. By the end of the decade conscription was scrapped, tertiaryeducation was free, access to abortion had improved, the White Australia policywas abolished and a woman read the news on the ABC for the first time.

TheSeventies was the decade that shaped modern Australia. It was the decade of'It's Time', stagflation and the Dismissal, a tumultuous period of economic andpolitical upheaval. But the Seventies was also the era when the personal becamepolitical, when we had a Royal Commission into Human Relationships and when socialmovements tore down the boundary between public and private life. Women wantedchildcare, equal pay, protection from violence and agency to shape their ownlives. In the process, the reforms they sought - and achieved, at least in part - reshaped Australia's culture and rewrote our expectations of government.

Ina lively and engaging style, Michelle Arrow has written a new history of thistransformative decade; one that is more urgent, and more resonant, than ever.

'At last, personal politics as national history. In lucid and nimble prose, Michelle Arrow demonstrates that - in the 1970s at least - it was about the relationships, stupid. A revelation.' - Clare Wright