Farewell to 2013. As we note the passing of the year - among its memories, a grand salute to John F. Kennedy, a totemic goodbye for Nelson Mandela, a taking stock of Margaret Thatcher - dare we say at last: goodbye to the 20th century?
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There were times when 2013 seemed the year of closing the book on a century that began as a laggard. Historians often mark 1914, when World War I began, as the birth of the epoch - not 1900. A hundred years on, the shambolic, shifting landscape of this year provided its share of bookends to that period, even as drafts were being written of an uncertain and unnerving future.
Of that future, a manic media invited us to consider the many ways in which moments great and small portended good or ill. Crucial questions that will come to define the years ahead were among them.
It was, for instance, the year of Edward Snowden. It was also the year of snowfalls in Cairo, and it was the year of the 24/7 snow job, or at least it often felt like that for Australian voters confronted with a permanent political campaign.
We drowned in an avalanche of promises that began in January with an election date pledge (broken), stopped off for declarations of leadership loyalty (broken), delivered two prime ministers (and broke both) and settled on a third who promised a grown-up, drama-free government (broken). The policy pirouettes on both sides were en pointe, but graceless.
These were a few among the matters that required our attention and insisted on it, because they all touched on issues pivotal to how we might navigate that dimly lit road ahead, from climate change to education, to the confronting and confusing debates around privacy in the digital age. Easier said than done, but the fact that an issue defies simple understanding doesn't get you off the hook these days.
Fiercely held opinions are the thing. Doubt is out of fashion. Q&A will not invite you back if your answer to a question is ''I don't know'' or ''I can see your point.'' Talkback radio might have you arrested for nuance. Twitter prefers you declare yourself with a hashtag.
Whatever your opinions, the volume of information available to inform them can threaten to overwhelm before it enlightens. Slaking a thirst for news can feel like taking a sip from a water cannon.
One of the stories of the year stood out as an emblem of the times: hard to believe, difficult to understand, serious in implication and consequence, and it was a moment that helped the year earn its pivotal stature. In the NRL and the AFL, as elsewhere, there will ever now be the era before 2013 and the era after.
As the performance-enhancing drugs scandal swamped Australian sport - a crisis unleashed with the February release of a report by the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority alleging widespread abuse across sports and ties to organised crime - reactions varied. Government grandstanding was a natural suspicion for many; benefit of the doubt an inclination for some; disbelief and disappointment a home for others.
What seemed unlikely when the story broke was that it would soon morph into a modern morality play that divided fans, ended friendships, ruined careers and shattered - for how long no one can tell - public faith in the integrity of our sports people and their administrators.
The scandal engulfed the Essendon Bombers in Melbourne, ensnared their coach, James Hird, and eventually cost Hird and others their jobs and the club its premiership points.
In NSW, the spotlight fell on the Cronulla Sharks, who, like the Bombers, had used the services of sports scientist Stephen Danks. Like the Bombers, before the year was done the club would pay a heavy price - a $1 million fine and coach Shane Flanagan suspended for breaching the game's code of conduct with its 2011 supplements program (final penalties will be decided next month).
In Sydney, the news was dominated otherwise by what has come to seem standard Sydney fare - no compliment intended. There was the Eddie Obeid corruption inquiry at the Independent Commission Against Corruption, with the commission in July recommending criminal charges against Obeid and others over a corrupt coal exploration deal.
In April, former Nationals MP Richard Torbay was in the spotlight after a Fairfax Media investigation raised doubts over the tendering process for Centrelink leases.
In June, the city lost one icon held in limited affection - the Monorail came down - and in December work began on a city landmark whose fate in the public heart is yet unknown: the $6 billion Barangaroo project on Sydney Harbour.
Meanwhile, an old warhorse is getting a multibillion-dollar facelift to match the sparkling facades of its more modern city counterparts: the new convention and exhibition complex is tipped to generate $200 million in economic activity in NSW every year once it's finished.
As the sports drug scandal unfolded mid-year, another media vigil unfolded far from these shores and involved the world. We braced ourselves for the news of Mandela's passing when he went into hospital in early June. It seemed a matter of days. Nobody expected months. When the news came in early December, it wasn't a shock - it even seemed a blessing - but it was a moment of unmatched magnitude in modern times.
Why that was so is a question that summons many answers. He wore the hat of hero to freedom fighters as easily as he did the robes of sanctification as peacemaker and humanity's moral compass.
In South Africa it's more complicated, but there's no doubt his passing delineates a new era. The country has had two ruling parties since 1948 - the white Nationals and, since 1994, Mandela's ANC. Its DNA is 20th-century DNA - carbon dated to the Cold War. When President Jacob Zuma was jeered at Mandela's funeral, it was a ripple with resonance. A new generation of voters, not even alive when Mandela was freed from prison, may find a different kind of liberation in his passing.
The legend of Mandela held other meanings and other uses for politicians far from Johannesburg. He was a myth for all seasons, an icon for all men, and, when he died, they descended on the city of gold in unprecedented numbers to honour him. Four United States presidents were there, along with one Castro and, from the African neighbourshood, a certain Robert Mugabe.
However, it was US President Barack Obama's day, a meeting of man and moment and oratorical skill that will delight historians born many decades hence.
Those historians may not need to know how badly Obama needed a moment in December 2013 to remind us of why he captivated us in the first place in 2008, but it is no doubt the year they will look back on to record the dog days of his presidency, and whether they were here to stay.
He has three years to run, but any turnaround will be tempered by cynicism at home over congressional gridlock and a botched healthcare rollout, and his branding abroad as the president whose drones kill children by remote control and whose spies are poking about in your emails and phone calls.
There's no hiding your feet of clay for long any more, not even for the one-time Democrats messiah, and Obama was blessed in the final weeks of a terrible year to find some light in which to bask.
It shone from the last century, courtesy of Mandela and, a few weeks earlier, thanks to a global week of wallowing in the memory of president John F. Kennedy, whose assassination marked its 50th anniversary on November 22. It was grand and decorated with standard Camelot glories, and those at-a-glance reminders of New Frontier hope and promise can have no downside for Obama.
Yet you couldn't escape the feeling that this myth was being taken for its final major public walkabout. The 50th anniversary was a suitable moment for the fiction of Camelot to complete its passage from touchstone to historical curiosity.
Obama, the first US president for whom the shibboleths of the 20th century are not a defining experience, now walks forward in his own shrunken shoes - an era still his to define if he can find a voice to describe what it might look like and why we would want to live there.
Even then, the rest of the world may have other ideas. The American century began in 1914. A century on, 2014 begins with US power and influence in decline and a world absent of nearly all the certainties that governed its decades of hegemony. Events in Egypt and Syria defy prediction, just as the bloodshed witnessed there often defies belief. This year's surprise nuclear deal with a mildly reformist Iran offers hope, but history suggests caution.
Putin-led Russia has been ascendant and we will soon discover whether he's nimble or facing more difficult times. His end-of-year release of political prisoners, including former rival Mikhail Khodorkovsky and members of the band Pussy Riot, is seen as a gesture of appeasement. Russia has its moment on the global stage with the Sochi Winter Olympics in February, and is facing boycotts by athletes and other leaders because of Putin's anti-gay laws.
It may take more than that to quiet the clamour for reform. On that score, Putin has something in common with other world leaders dragging the chain on the civil rights issue that has taken centre stage around the world in recent years.
This year was no exception, as same-sex marriage laws were advanced globally, with Britain to join 15 other countries with legalised gay unions in early 2014.
Australia is among the laggers, a deficiency more glaring for its incompatibility with progress in the countries it most resembles. This year came with a step forward - legalised marriage in the ACT - and a nominal step back when the High Court ruled that law illegal in December. The main game is in the Federal Parliament, where Prime Minister Tony Abbott maintains his opposition, but many around him on all sides agitate openly for change.
Polls suggest the public wants it. A conscience vote next year could be up for grabs. Once a wedge issue, stopping gay marriage is now close to being the ultimate heritage policy, an old standard past its use-by date.
Whatever way it goes, it is unlikely ever to be a priority for the Prime Minister. Among his pledges to voters was that he would focus on the things that really mattered to them. No need to unpack that or any other Abbott statement from his opposition leader days. It's blunt and says what he intends it to say or at least to imply. The surprise, then, has been that the first months of his tenure would be marred by a blizzard of backdowns and backflips, or, if you like, changing commitments forced on the government by the mess Labor left behind.
The polls suggest the public isn't buying it - no government has plunged so far, so soon - but these rumblings are unlikely to bother Abbott and co. yet, barely into their term and with a thumping majority we are led to believe would have been even larger had Kevin Rudd not graciously agreed to cop a big but lesser belting for Labor at the September election.
Rudd had returned in triumph, toppling Julia Gillard as prime minister almost three years to the day after she'd done him in.
We'll never know what might have happened had she stayed on. What we will know is what these two will do next. Both out of Parliament, Gillard is in demand here and abroad, as is Rudd. One certainty is that Rudd fans have it easier keeping track. He will always be ''Kevin 07'', here to help and master of the selfie.
He wasn't snapping solo. A social-media obsession - another way of describing self-obsession, many would say - was not Rudd's alone. Australia joined, and so did the world. It's barely a decade old, though much of it is younger, but it's hard to imagine life without it.
There was no retreat in 2013. Many of us tweet and Tumblr and like and share and Snapchat with the fervent dedication of addicts, and this addiction knows no boundaries. It's something we share with the rich and famous, and it's where they purport to share with us.
To speak of just a handful who served as our prime celebrity distractions in 2013, it's where Justin Bieber tells us he's retiring; where Kanye and Kim Kardashian share baby news; where Beyonce and Taylor Swift target tens of millions of fans who buy tens of millions of records; where Shane Warne romances Liz Hurley, then laments love's labour lost; and where, in June, the world shared a moment it might rather forget: Miley Cyrus twerked.
This year was no different from other recent years in that respect. We gorged unstintingly and mostly without embarrassment on trivia and gossip, the internet our ever-efficient enabler.
But in 2013, the web officially became something more sinister. Edward Snowden ensured that we would never look at our phones or computers or our governments the same way again. His revelations of the spying activities by the US National Security Agency - and by extension its allies such as Australia - rocked governments and citizenry.
For leaders such as Obama and Abbott, there were immediate headaches - explanations required for taps on the leaders of Germany and Indonesia - but the activities revealed by Snowden will have an impact reverberating far beyond this year or any individual.
In the 20th century, we connived in the invasion of our own privacy, distracted by the novelty of the new. In the 21st century, how much of it we reclaim and what attempts are made to thwart us seems set to define wide areas of public debate.
The governed and the governing will need new understandings. It's the beginning of something - just as 2013, to nick a line from Hemingway, felt like the end of something - a century not marked on the calendar, but defined by events and the men and women who were part of them.
It's fitting, then, to end with farewells to the giants who passed into history this past year. There was Lou Reed's last walk on the wild side; Chopper Read's last confession; Ronnie Biggs, crook and character; David Frost, Nixon inquisitor and so much more; Tom Clancy, thriller; Peter O'Toole, wild man and wondrous actor; Peter Harvey, who will always be from Canberra; Bill Peach, as Australian as red dust; Pat Lovell, film pioneer; and Patty Andrews - yes, in case you missed it, the year took the last of the Andrews Sisters, aged 94.
Finally, back to April, when we observed the death of Thatcher. There was contention in death as in life, but her passing, as with the death of Mandela, required appraisal of a striking life and times, while also reminding us how far we now feel removed from the years that they helped define.
In 2013, we ushered that age into its place. In 2014, just as it did a century ago, a new era beckons.