Cohorts and Time Travel
My Bubba is 97 years old this year. She was born in the Soviet Union, in what is now Ukraine. She spent most of her teenage years hiding from the Nazis in what is now Kazakhstan. From memory, I believe she was alone. She had sensitive digestion as a child and struggled with the black and brown bread her family mostly subsisted on, even before the war. Her mother would try to provide her with white bread whenever it was possible to afford refined flour. Such luxuries were harder to come by during the war but she learned to adapt and was grateful simply to survive while most of the people she had known were being exterminated in Hitler’s death camps.
Bubba learned to adapt again in what would soon re-form as Poland after the war, where she met my Zaida. Zaida died several years ago at 92. He was born in Warsaw and survived both the ghetto and the camps. He was clever and industrious, learning to make himself valuable as a means of staying alive. A few years after the war they fled Poland suddenly, having been tipped off that the authorities were after them. Jewish persecution was still overt and often government-sponsored. Eventually, they made their way to Australia to start again, again.
When they were born, the life expectancy in the Soviet Union was 36 but closer to 50 in Poland. Running water, flushing toilets and electricity weren’t commonly found in homes - theirs included. They came to Australia on a series of flights rather than the overwhelmingly more common journey by sea made by my maternal grandfather, Hans. It meant the trip here took a matter of weeks and not months, thanks to the technological breakthroughs of the first and second world wars.
It’s strange to think of a world where countries might be weeks or months apart or the time not long before when all information could only travel as quickly as people could carry it. I’ve been reading first-hand accounts of Australia’s earliest European explorers. Matthew Flinders and two Aboriginal men, Bungaree and Nanbaree were the first people to circumnavigate Australia at the dawn of the 19th century. Their discoveries were immense but, on his journey back to England, Flinders was detained in French-controlled Mauritius for seven years. Most of those discoveries and the first complete map of Australia remained unknown through all that time.
Flinders lived to be 40 - about average for his time and exceptional for his profession. He died before many of his discoveries were published. Most of us get a lot longer these days, in a world incomprehensibly smaller than the one Flinders knew, or even than the one my Bubba and Zaida were born into. It’s hard to know if the world is changing at an increasingly rapid pace but we don’t need to look back especially far, even in our own lifetimes, to realise it changes significantly. It’s got me thinking about living longer in a world that seems to be changing ever faster.
I keep coming across this word ‘cohort’, which isn’t new but I’ve started seeing it everywhere. I keep it close at hand, ready to explain that strange feeling I get when talking to my dad about politics (not recommended) or my mum about identity (also). We’re living in the same time but having vastly different experiences of it and understandably so.
There are people alive today, like my Bubba, whose formative years were in many ways more similar to Matthew Flinders than they were to my own. They are called formative years because they shape who we are and how we experience the world. We’re sharing a world, attempting to navigate through our period of history alongside a growing number of increasingly different cohorts. It makes me wonder if my Bubba, when she leaves the house, if it feels like she’s stumbled into the future. Or what it’s like to have a dream from your childhood and be transported back to a place that no longer exists and a time when white bread and running water were uncommon privileges.
I don’t know who is now; to which cohort the present belongs but it seems like a good word to keep handy while we figure it out.