How the gods must have laughed at our hubris as reality unfolded: wars breaking out as Cold War tensions thawed; the horrors of religious fundamentalism; the internet becoming a channel for ignorance and hatred; robots replacing humans, serving at supermarket checkouts and roaming the skies armed with missiles. For many people, 2001 is when everything started to go wrong. The spectacular terrorist attacks in September made it a year none of us can forget, but how critical was it in reality? This is the question that Phillipa McGuinness sets out to answer in The Year Everything Changed: 2001.

It was an extraordinarily eventful year, in Australia as well as overseas, with one shocking event overtaking another with dizzying speed. McGuinness presents her material in twelve chapters, each covering the events of a single month and their implications. This works well when there is a single topic on which to focus. For example, ask ten people about the significance of 2001, and I doubt whether many would mention the centenary of our country’s foundation. In January, McGuinness watched the Federation parade in Sydney and recognised ‘a fizzer’ when she saw it. Like it or not, she writes, Anzac Day is our national celebration, commemorating the first time that an Australian army fought under one flag. As Paul Keating remarked, Australia was not founded on grand ideals, but ‘put together by lawyers and businessmen ... who set us up as a British satellite’. In June, McGuinness focuses on finance and how it affected our lives. She describes the cascade of business failures in Australia during the year: Ansett, Harris Scarfe, South Pacific Tyres, Daimaru, and more. Thousands lost their jobs. China’s economy ranked sixth in the world in 2001 (lower than California); by 2017 it had risen to second place. In the United States, meanwhile, George W. Bush became president, inheriting a budget in surplus. By 2017, thanks to Republican tax cuts and the cost of Middle East adventurism, the US federal debt exceeded $20 trillion.

The 9/11 terror attacks remain so familiar that they are difficult to encapsulate in any meaningful way. McGuinness does this through an account of visiting the World Trade Centre memorial, tenderly describing the exhibits. It is the shoes which undid her, she writes. Hundreds of shoes are all that remain of so many: a pair of high heels covered in blood; a battered pair of loafers which ran down thousands of stairs; a brogue shoe worn by a businessman who jumped to his death. ‘9/11 rebooted our imagination,’ she writes.

Phillipa McGuinness (photography by Mel Koutchavlis)Another chapter focuses on what McGuinness terms John Howard’s ‘Falklands Election’, won after the infamous Tampa and SIEV X incidents. The government’s response ‘created its own demand, igniting elements of nationalism, populism, and racism’, wrote Paul Kelly. Since 2001, Australia has been poisoned by these toxins released into the body politic. McGuinness picks apart the long-term harms done by the government’s cynical exploitation of the refugee smuggling crisis. The worst consequence was the incitement of fear and hatred of refugees, especially Muslims, opening up the ‘Overton window’ of acceptable discourse to include racism. John Howard was a dangerously masterful politician. This is nowhere more evident than in his skilful manipulation of the media to dehumanise the refugees, demanding that their faces be pixelated on news reports and whipping up outrage that children had been thrown into the sea (a claim exposed as a lie by a subsequent Senate inquiry).

Other chapters are less successful, sweeping material into a single month under a general rubric such as human rights or technology. An exception is December. McGuinness describes the stillbirth she experienced and its impact on herself and her family. The chapter is poignant but sits uncomfortably with the chatty, fact-filled tone of the rest of the book. There is also a colloquial tone in some sections which strikes a false note. ‘It’s part of my schtick,’ she writes, ‘don’t get me started ... what’s not to like ... here’s a doozy ... go figure.’ Presumably intended to make the text more approachable, this only succeeds in being grating. The book is let down, too, by the cramming of excessive detail about events into each chapter. As McGuinness might have written, ‘Lots of trees. Wood, not so much.’ This reflects an unresolved tension in the book between being a month-by-month almanac and a more thoughtful thematic analysis of that momentous year. Allowing herself space to do the latter would have made for a more complete understanding of this first year of the twentieth century and the strange, unsettling period that has followed.