One of the standard questions at interviews involved asking about historical events associated with November 11. The eyes of one bright young applicant dimmed. After a bit, she said: "Wasn't it the end of the Second World War?"

"The first, actually," I said. "You'd get about a quarter of a point for that, on a generous day. Anything else?"

"No, I can't think of anything."

"Gough Whitlam ..." I proffered.

"No, doesn't ring any bells."

"John Kerr?"

"No, sorry."

"Well, never mind," I said. "It was the day the Whitlam government was sacked in 1975."

The girl was quite indignant: "Mr Waterford. I don't think that question was very fair. I wasn't even born in 1975!"

I never asked the question of any job applicants again. The 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam government - a seminal event in my life, a part of history in which I had been present - was now ancient history, beyond the ken of modern men and women. Like another November 11 event: the hanging of Ned Kelly.

That (the job interview, not the hanging of our Ned) was about 15 years ago. The incident does not reduce my belief that the typical bright young woman or man of today ought to have a passing knowledge of politics and history - even, if Whitlam is to be included, ancient history.

But it serves as a reminder that nearly two generations have passed since a towering person such as Gough Whitlam figured significantly in the minds of women and men. Sir John Kerr sacked him 39 years ago. It was a sensational event and, I guess, most 16-year-olds were talking about it the next day. That 16-year-old would be 55 today, and most who are younger would not remember the event.

The girl I was interviewing, who did not even recognise the name, would now be about 37, which is the median age in Australia. More than half of the present Australian population had not been born in 1975.

The typical students who started at Australian universities this year, or enrolled to vote, were not born when Paul Keating was prime minister and, probably, had no real recollection of the Howard government. It is, however, possible, they witnessed, about kindergarten age, contemporary television images of aircraft flying into the Twin Towers.

It is quite possible that a significantly older adult in their lives - their lecturer or professor, say, or their SES-level work boss -- has no actual memory of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of Yugoslavia or ads for cigarettes in newspapers. Or, for that matter, of daily life before the personal computer and the mobile telephone.

Each year, Beloit College, in the US, publishes a Mindset list (beloit.edu/mindset) as a guide for distinguished visitors speaking at its commencement ceremonies, reminding them of some of the "life experience" limitations of the class, typically of 18-year-olds, they will be addressing. It's always an amusing read for a working journalist, even if it is focused on US culture. It is sometimes said that two thirds of Americans, even of mature years, cannot place in correct chronological order the American War of Independence, the Civil War and the Vietnam War, and that a third are not certain World War I occurred before World War II.

There are, of course, many who were around - indeed, active participants in events - during times as recent as the Whitlam years. For some, the controversies still rankle, or are, at the least, seen as being at the base of many of the careers, attitudes and politics of many of the years that followed. But it is sometimes salutary to remember that many of those we hope are reading, or listening, sometimes need a little context and explanation, some fitting of the narrative into the present, some sense, perhaps, of why it still matters, to them as much as older Australians.

Someone writing this week about the orgy of reminiscence, obituary and, probably, self-indulgence after news of the death of Whitlam remarked we were mourning our lost youth as much as the great man himself. Likewise, the reaction against Whitlam by some of an earlier generation, with a strong memory of the Depression, war and the massive 1940s dislocation of people in Europe was a reaction against their own dashed dreams and hopes. Some of these feared at times that the Whitlam government represented some sort of pre-revolutionary situation, from which, sooner or later - preferably sooner - decent and sensible folk of the officer class would have to rescue the nation. To them, Whitlam seemed to represent some sort of mob rule, abandonment of traditional morality, and descent into economic and social chaos, from which, sooner or later, the adults were going to have to rescue the children and take charge. The intervention by Sir John Kerr was, in this respect, in the nick of time.

Whitlam was a generation and a half older than the baby boomers with whom his brief but brilliant ascent and descent was associated. But, unlike a good many of his colleague-contemporaries, he was already substantially out of a pattern of thinking that was based on bitter class politics, sectarianism, and awful memories of the Great Depression and war.

In old Labor, even for the optimists, and Labor and Australia had them, economic and social development seemed like a somewhat grim and incremental business, rather than any sort of adventure. Laughing and joking, especially at or about ourselves, suggested frivolousness. The Coalition, moreover, had well rehearsed "where's the money coming from lines" that suggested anything going beyond its own ( also generally progressive) incrementalism was utopian and unaffordable - indeed, criminally irresponsible

Australia had had, by the end of the 1960s, more than 25 years of steady, if unspectacular economic growth. It was still governed by generations scarred by the wasted and lost opportunities of the war and the Depression, but for 30 years, even these had nearly always had jobs, had been able to form families, buy houses and televisions, to become consumers and to become aspirational. Many were ripe for a pitch that suggested we could do ever better - and sometimes for others.

The younger half of the population had never experienced mass unemployment, deflation (or hyperinflation) and the chaos of war, and many entirely lacked the dread of it. They had been told at school that Keynesian economics had more or less abolished severe economic cycles. The experience of the 1950s and 1960s seemed to support this: it was not that there had been no lurches in one direction or another, but many of the "automatic stabilisers" had seemed to work.

It was not, as some now suggest, that the 1950s and 1960s were dreary years of wasted opportunities, although Labor supporters, in particular, chafed about the slowness of progress to a welfare state. Those years might be more accurately described as years of building a base of social, economic and cultural capital from which the population could aspire to climb much further.

Baby boomers - the big bulge in the population born after the war, and increasingly better educated thanks to increasing public investment in education - were coming of age. Their outlook and their optimism, and, perhaps their faith and hope in what collective activity could achieve, was far more marked than in the broader electorate. Many of them were generous of spirit, and saw that a stage had been reached in which the general prosperity could be harnessed to do something to improve the lot of those not doing so well, here or abroad.

For many, Whitlam was the person who inspired some of that feeling, articulated things that could be done, worked hard in the electorate to enthuse people with a sense of the possible, and who harnessed them into a political movement. He was as remarkable for being unlike conventional Labor - as then known - as he was for being Labor to his bootstraps. For one thing, he was born into the middle class, and had never personally known want. If he had, and preached, a faith in collective action, he was not a leveller, a doctrinaire socialist nor one who had professed much faith in nationalisation. He was an elitist, even as he promoted equality of opportunity. He was an intellectual, and he did not sneer at learning, or aspirations. He was a nationalist, proud of his country and keen to see it stand rather more by itself on the stage. On significant issues - on racism, on Aboriginal affairs, on aid to Catholic schools, and on his focus on universities - he shifted his party's thinking as much as he did the electorate's.

Whitlam's continuing hold on a national memory rests on the way he enlarged the Australian vision, raised the national tone and articulated great national themes; that he created and mobilised believers, and that politics was never the same since. Even his political opponents and detractors admit (and perhaps deplore) his influence and effect.

It has long been said of the ebbs and flows of the sort of politics that has governed a Britain, the US, Canada, or an Australia over the past century that the differences have never been that great between right-of-centre, and left-of-centre parties. Generally (though not invariably) left are the reformers, the innovators and the extenders of government activity. Generally, the right will say that the others went too far (perhaps too quickly) and slows things down. But they rarely turn back. Government today is 50 per cent bigger, as a proportion of GDP, than in Whitlam's time.

Others have said that one side tends to act as an accelerator and the other as a brake. But new governments rarely undo the significant changes wrought by their predecessors, even as they are accused of doing so. Most of the significant changes made by Whitlam in the 1970s are still a feature of Australian politics. Some, such as, say, land rights, administrative law reform and multiculturalism were conceived in Whitlam's time but actually put into effect by a successor Coalition government.

It is quite true, as some of the narks have commented, that a good deal of practical Whitlam government was a nightmare and a disaster, that economic management and good ministerial management fell away, and that there was something inevitable in the descent into incompetence, over events such as the loans affair. It is hard to forget fantasy, the foolishness and silliness encapsulated by images of Bob Hawke and Jim Cairns at the 1975 Terrigal Conference of the ALP.

One can quibble over what went wrong, or whose fault it was, or, foolishly, still maintain the rage about the dismissal of November 11.

None of that, as such, matters these days, at least to many of the believers. It is a part of the parable that the dream went sour, that the hopes were never quite fulfilled, and that many aspirations were dashed against the rocks. That those who had lived, and hoped and fancied and dreamed struck reality, and came to realise that it wasn't that easy, that simple. That faith and hope and charity were not enough. The mythology is, as ever, founded more on emotion and belief, than fact.

I'm not saying that we all properly prospered or profited from the experience. Or all learnt the same lessons. But one can be wistful and remember what it was to be alive in stirring and noble, if sometimes futile, days. Has there been a date - whether of good or of bad - since that has become etched on the national consciousness?