If ever a year deserved to be summed up in a cheap meme, it was 2024. It was the year that felt like being awake during surgery.
Sometimes the social media chuckle gallery hits the nail right on the head, but for all the spot-on accuracy of that assessment, it’s also a year that warranted a search for its better angels; a sifting through the flotsam and jetsam for the fairy dust and joy. And there were halos to be found if you looked hard enough.
“This is the biggest show we’ve done on this tour or any tour,” Taylor Swift told the crowd of 96,000 at the MCG.Credit: Jason South
There was, for instance, a moment back in February when the MCG – a place that brings the feels during footy in September or the cricket on Boxing Day – seemed to swallow the entire city in a joyous embrace as host to the largest crowd of Taylor Swift’s entire 149-show Eras Tour.
It was a tour, and a show, unlike anything Australia or Swift herself had ever seen. “You’re making me feel like I get to play a show for 96,000 beautiful people in Melbourne tonight,” a visibly stunned Swift told the heaving crowd, which was boosted by several thousand more fans “Taylor-gating” outside the stadium. “This is the biggest show that we have done on this tour, or any tour, ever.”
The Swiftian joyfest then moved to Sydney, where the total turnout was even bigger (320,000 over four shows).
“Sydney, you are making me feel absolutely phenomenal,” she declared. The feeling was clearly mutual and spread far beyond the venues. As she had done on other stops on the Eras tour, Swift proved a human tonic to everything that ails us — from economic worries (Swiftonomics became a subject worthy of study) to general social malaise.
We spend much of our time worrying about the yoof; especially young women. Well, in 2024 Taylor Swift turned up to show us that the kids are alright.
And she wasn’t alone. Swiftmania was the herald of what would become the year that “girl power” – a worn and slightly tatty ’90s concept – received a fresh, ferocious update for the 21st century as something deeper, stronger and powered by a kind of worldly-wise joy.
Year of the brat
Forget sense and sensibility; 2024 was all sass and sensibility.
Sabrina Carpenter parlayed her supporting status on the Eras Tour into a blockbuster year that elevated her to near the very top of the tree with no need for Swift’s booster seat. In Carpenter, pop music added another voice that was savvy, sassy, sexy and smart — from the unavoidable bop of Espresso to the come-to-bed brashness of her smash album Short n’ Sweet.
Charli XCX took things a step further. The British singer staked her claim to the year by giving 2024 a word, a colour and an attitude all wrapped up in one album – Brat. She summed it up like this: “You’re just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes. Who feels herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of like, parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile. Like, does dumb things. But it’s brat. You’re brat. That’s brat.”
Was 2024 the year of the brat? Charli XCX fans certainly thought so.
If it doesn’t make sense to you, that’s probably because it isn’t meant to.
But as a sensibility, it rode a cultural wave – the joy wave – so adroitly Kamala Harris even hitched her (ill-fated) Joy Wagon to the phenomenon. On a similar train was American Chappell Roan – dubbed the Joy Rebel of the Year – whose success confirmed young women were increasingly sailing different seas from the rest of the culture, and landing in happier places.
Gold medal to Celine Dion’s Paris Olympics performance.Credit: Screengrab by IOC via Getty Images
In July, it was a diva of a different era who elevated the Paris Olympics, as a wet and occasionally weird opening ceremony gave way to the thing we mostly remember about it – the moment we heard the voice and then spotted the figure of a glistening Celine Dion perched within the Eiffel Tower. It was a moment of extraordinary power – of personal resilience and vocal artistry – that lifted the event out of the damp Paris streets and elevated it to a moment of genuine collective emotion.
Paris in summer was where we went looking for hope during the Australian winter, and our team delivered. Well, the women did anyway, bringing home 13 of the 18 gold and 27 of the 45 medals overall for our greatest Games ever.
Alongside the usual heroics in the pool (Kaylee McKeown became the first Australian to win four individual gold was one stand-out among a team of them), there were more eccentric goings-on elsewhere in the Olympic city.
You could, if you so chose, react to Rachael “Raygun” Gunn’s zero-point car crash with a scowl and a sneer. Many did, but the open-hearted were able to see the funny side. As were comedians around the world, who found in the Australian breakdancer one of the year’s true unifying comedic moments. In a year of much misery, this achievement should not be underappreciated.
There were happy cultural warriors elsewhere, too.
In Hollywood, Nicole Kidman seemed to star in every other movie and series – as Steve Martin quipped at the Emmys, “when I see an actor I don’t know, I just say, ‘I loved your scene with Nicole Kidman’, and nine times out of 10, I’m right.” Our Nic took time out from starring in everything to win everything. This included inhaling the very rare air of an American Film Institute Life Achievement Award. Flying the flag for the younger generation, Adelaide’s Sarah Snook carted home an Emmy and a Golden Globe and warmed up for her 2025 Broadway run in The Picture Of Dorian Gray with a Laurence Olivier Award for the same tour de force in London.
Ms Everywhere: It was a big year for Nicole Kidman.Credit: Dave Benett/WireImage
Loyalty to royalty
Acting royalty elevated us to higher planes. Garden variety royalty also played its part.
Mary Donaldson, erstwhile of Hobart and Sydney, became Queen of Denmark in January, giving hope to everyone who met someone in a bar during the Sydney Olympics almost 25 years ago. You don’t have to love royalty to breathe the occasional sigh of relief at the distraction they provide from the daily grind, and you don’t have to be a monarchist to be pleased that the Princess of Wales faced and emerged from a cancer diagnosis in strong and dignified spirit.
In the natural world, bad news abounds when it comes to climate change – but there were bright spots.
Did you know Britain closed its last coal power station in September? Or that renewables surged even in the US, where wind generation outpaced coal for the first time? Or that in the Amazon, deforestation reached record lows this year? It did. All is not lost yet.
For some old-fashioned cheer from Mother Nature, you could wallow in dog and cat videos on social media (and millions of us did) – or you could turn your gaze to another heroine we didn’t know we needed, the Tay Tay of the Choeropsis liberiensis world.
In September, the world fell in love with Moo Deng, a pygmy hippo, a girl whose social media fame drew attention to the plight and past of her species. Who knew the pygmy hippo came with a history this rich, star of a Liberian legend in which Moo Deng’s kind find their way through the forest at night by carrying diamonds in their mouths to light the way?
This pygmy hippo has become a viral sensation.Credit: Khao Kheow Open Zoo
Now we know, and we are the better for it.
Closer to home, Pesto the king penguin gained global fame as a social media superstar, famous on TikTok as the largest chick Melbourne’s Sea Life aquarium has ever seen. Big, beautiful and comfortable in his own skin, Pesto was the kind of hero – “calm, curious and friendly” – we needed in a year when male humans to admire were thin on the ground.
For other bright lights in the darkness, we needed look no further than our own southern skies, with the return on several occasions of the aurora australis, which made rare and spectacular appearances as far north as Queensland in May, September and October. Scientists and citizens alike were dazzled by a liquid light show of pinks and whites and purples and greens.
Was there a better symbol of hope than this – a phenomenon named for Aurora, the Roman goddess of dawn, announcing the arrival of a new day? It was as if we had been given a celestial preview of what would become the year’s biggest cultural event, one that also asked us to look skyward – or in the words of the song of the year, Defying Gravity, “look to the western sky”.
Bright lights, all right. Aurora australis seen in Victoria.Credit: Facebook/Travis Carroll
The screen adaptation of Wicked landed in cinemas in mid-November, amid one of the strangest promotional tours in memory and hot on the heels of an American political earthquake two weeks earlier. The weird on-camera adventures of Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande were at times almost as entertaining as the film they starred in. And the movie’s storyline, adapted from the 2003 stage musical, could have been taken as a contemporary riff on the state of the world, very specifically, at the end of 2024.
Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo star in Wicked.Credit: Out.com
Wicked is a tale of defiance and friendship forged in the most difficult of circumstances; of surmounting challenges and differences; of flying, literally, in the face of a world that seeks to define you. It was, as so many of the hopeful things were in 2024, a message delivered by and to young women startling in their confidence and talent, happy to defy the doom with which the times seek to burden them.
The song that ends the film became the year’s musical battle cry – a moment when art and heart met irresistible force, and art and heart won. If ever a year needed an anthem, it was this one – and in Defying Gravity it found it.
In a year that insisted we be sad and scared – or summed up in a cheap meme – it was proof there was still space for hearts and minds to soar.
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