Recession was biting deep. Victoria had turned into a rust belt. The new year began with a slump in the dollar and unemployment levels passed 10 per cent – a figure not matched since the Great Depression.

"I suspect there are many Australians who are wondering if their Australia will survive the changes – if there will be a place for the 'Old Australia'," Keating said in his Australia Day address to the invited crowd in an Admiralty House marquee.

He said much of the "old Australia" had been born at the close of the 19th century and the "new Australia" could rise out of the 20th century's final decade but both the old and the new had to find common ground and common purpose.

Ten years later, Watson wrote that the 1992 Australia Day address in the governor-general's front garden, on the shores of the harbour in the city of the elites, stood as both a summary of his government's philosophy and ambitions and a prologue that half anticipated his own doom.

For Keating soon went where ordinary people feared to venture. He caused British tabloid apoplexy by placing his hand on Elizabeth II's back during her February visit to Australia. Fleet Street dubbed him the "Lizard of Oz". Things did not improve with either the British or some older Australians when in April he kissed the base of a memorial stone at the Kokoda battlefield to reposition the battle as Australia's true blooding to defend the homeland.

Twenty-three months later, Keating's stunning election victory of March 1993 gave Labor a fifth win on the trot.

Liberal leader John Hewson helped Keating with a crazy brave GST proposal in his "Fightback!" manifesto and his failure to explain how the tax would work on the ingredients of a birthday cake during a television interview on the Nine Network.

A grateful Kerry Packer threw his considerable weight behind Keating.  Years before Keating had been a driving force behind media law changes that permitted Packer to crawl out from under his father Frank's pile of money: a Packer minion let Keating climb all over Hewson in a debate that also saw the "worm" debut.

Debt paid, Packer dumped Keating and made John Howard his 1996 boy.

Despite the supposed "surprise" of Keating's election victory, ALP policies still had not kicked in and Australians had begun to tire of change and uncertainty.

Economics was Keating's forte but what mainly echoes down the years of his prime ministership occurred in 1992: the June High Court of Australia Mabo decision, recognising native title in Australia and his Redfern speech the following December when he became the first prime minister to acknowledge white responsibility for Indigenous woes.

On a less worthy plain, perhaps, Keating provided a new dimension to pork barrelling in 1993 when his investment in a Scone piggery attracted three years of constant sniping and the pong refused to fade until he lost power in 1996.

If Keating's fade to black was slow, politics at a lower level drifted inexorably towards the conservatives far earlier over 1992 and 1993.

In Western Australia, Carmen Lawrence lost to the Liberals' Richard Court; Tasmania's minority Labor government (supported by the Bob Brown-led Greens) was unseated by Ray Groom's Liberals, and after nine years of power in Victoria, Labor's new leader Joan Kirner was thumped by Jeff Kennett's Coalition. In South Australia, Dean Brown led the Liberals to an easy win over Labor's Lynn Arnold.

Nick Greiner resigned after being caught up in the Independent Commission Against Corruption grinder and John Fahey became NSW premier; Queensland's Wayne Goss won a second term for Labor.

Australia's first built and designed Collins class submarine, HMAS Collins, was launched in late 1993.

Queensland voted down daylight saving after enduring it for three years. One- and two-cent coins begin to be withdrawn from circulation. Lindy Chamberlain received compensation for wrongful conviction of murder. And Kerry Packer pulled the plug mid-air on former radio DJ  Doug Mulray for being rude and crude and unattractive on Australia's Naughtiest Home Videos. The television soap A Country Practice was axed after a 12-year run in 1993.

In March 1993 Australia watched fascinated while Victoria police tracked down two prisoners who escaped from Melbourne's Remand Centre with the help of a female prison officer who had started a relationship with one of the criminals.

The first Big Day Out music festival and WOMADelaide were staged in 1992. The same year Tim Winton's Cloudstreet  won the Miles Franklin Award and Romper Stomper and Strictly Ballroom were the hot  Australian films. In 1992 the more cerebral (and New Zealand production) The Piano won three Oscars and five AFI awards.

The painters Sidney Nolan and  Brett Whiteley, actors/entertainers Judith Anderson and Peter Allen, cricketer Bill O'Reilly and the mining entrepreneur Lang Hancock died in 1992. The following year so too did Australia's most famous medicos Sir Edward "Weary" Dunlop and Fred Hollows and former governor-general Sir Paul Hasluck.

In the northern summer of 1993, Shane Warne took Mike Gatting's wicket with his first bowl in an English Test. Some still call his delivery the "Ball of the Century".

That September, IOC boss Juan Antonio Samaranch announced "Syd-en-ey" had been selected for the 2000 Summer Olympics.