‘You’ve come a long way, baby,’ said the slogan which positioned Virginia Slims as the cigarette for the emancipated American woman in the 1960s. And the ads were so effective that the brand was subsequently trialled in Australia. But women here evidently hadn’t made quite the same strides. Indeed, despite gaining suffrage decades earlier than their septic sisters, in the 1960s the status of Australia women was still better reflected by the plotlines of Bellbird than the writings of Germaine Greer. So Virginia Slims made only the briefest cameo appearance in the evolution of The Great Aussie Smoko.

The most influential female voice in Australian domestic affairs back then was probably still the Country Women’s Association, and far from the pejorative whiff it now has, the word ‘housewife’ described a role to which many Australian girls unashamedly aspired. Indeed, one of Ms Greer’s peers had to take it to London to realise its comic potential. Prior to Dame Edna monetising Moonee Ponds, the only biologically female Australians most Poms had heard of were sporting or musical icons. Thanks to my parents’ record collection Judith Durham and Joan Sutherland contributed as much to the soundtrack of my English childhood as the Beatles, and being a boy who preferred swimming and tennis to cricket, I idolised Dawn Fraser and Evonne Goolagong before I’d even heard of Don Bradman, a prioritisation a modern parent might identify as the onset of gender dysphoria.

There were other female Aussie sporting achievements I didn’t hear about until I got here. The only sailors most British kids of my generation could have named were Horatio Nelson and Captain Pugwash, and I would have considered the phrase ‘famous female sailor’ an oxymoron. But this was an opinion I changed soon after I arrived here. Before then, when asked to confirm an incontestable truth in beery male company, my response might have been ‘Did Rose Kennedy own a black dress?’ or ‘Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?’. In 1988 my adopted country provided me with the even more sexist option of ‘Does Kay Cottee masturbate?’

Meanwhile, in the great indoors, the glass ceiling remained remarkably sheila-proof. Despite her quick wit and expensive private education, my first Sydney girlfriend had no career ambition beyond being a secretary, cheerfully admitted to having been a ‘surfie chick’, and was happy to reprise the hand signals her previous boyfriend used to send her from the backwash while she shivered on the beach. A raised splayed hand meant ‘I’m coming out in five minutes’, two vigorously shaken fists meant ‘Get the sand off my towel’, one hand gripping an invisible tube meant ‘Get me a Chiko Roll’, and a horizontal karate chop meant ‘With no sauce’. I remember thinking it was a wonder Germaine waited as long as she did before heading for Tullamarine.

Thirty years later, Australian women seem to have more than made up for dragging their emancipatory heels. The trad-wife movement has gotten even less traction here than Virginia Slims did, and if any ad agency today recommended a campaign aimed at women that had the word ‘baby’ in its strapline, they’d lose the business. But that couldn’t happen for the simple reason that most of the people who now run Australia’s ad agencies are women, as are most of their creative directors, as are most of their clients. Which is a total inversion of the status quo of even twenty years ago. Something similar has happened in medicine, law and education. Female solicitors and GPs – demographic anomalies in the 1970s – now comfortably outnumber men. And whereas pre-schools used to be the only overwhelmingly female teaching domain, the same can now be said of most university humanities faculties. But it may be the transition of our body politic which will prove most consequential. Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech may not have stopped many people voting for Tony Abbott in 2013. But even her crustiest conservative opponents couldn’t dispute the numbers which inspired it; at the time, she was one of only 45 federal MPs out of a total of 226. Today, 46 per cent of federal seats are held by woman and 52 per cent of the Albanese cabinet are women – or, with respect to three of them, mean girls. Even his most influential conservative critic is now a woman – and one whose political ambitions were mocked twenty years ago. But some of the feminism in play in modern Australian politics and its media commentary goes beyond redressing a long-standing societal imbalance. Because some of it has been pressed by women like Lidia Thorpe and Leigh Sales into the service of various identitarian movements, and some of it has morphed into the kind of borderline pathological misandry which a few years ago prompted the ‘feminist’ influencer Clementine Ford to tell her not insignificant online audience, quite seriously, that ‘Covid isn’t killing men fast enough’. Call me old-fashioned – no, call me an unreconstructed middle-aged white male. But I’m starting to miss Julia.