Daily Inspiration Quote by Graeme Murphy

Nostalgia can be a kind of choreography: it edits the awkward bits, sharpens the gestures, and turns a messy decade into a clean, glowing tableau. When dancer and choreographer Graeme Murphy talks about a "golden era in the '40s" where Australians were "so conscious of who we were", he is reaching for that same staged clarity - not claiming the 1940s were easy, but that they were unusually legible.

The phrase "we moved" carries double weight coming from a dancer. On the surface it sounds like relocation, migration, social mobility. Underneath, it signals momentum: a country physically and psychologically in motion, pushed by wartime pressures and postwar reshaping. In that context, national identity stops being background wallpaper and becomes a daily decision. "So conscious" implies identity as something felt in the body - accent, manners, work, sacrifice, belonging - rather than an abstract civics lesson.

Calling it a "golden era" is less a historical verdict than an artistic diagnosis. Murphy is describing a moment when cultural confidence and difference snapped into focus, when being Australian could be performed without apology or mimicry. The subtext is also a critique of later decades: identity diluted by complacency, imported taste, or the numbing effect of prosperity. It reads like an argument for urgency in the arts - that the strongest work comes when a society knows what it is, and what it is not, and can move from that truth.