Rewind to 1 - 7 October 2006 — when secrets were about to get a lot harder to keep, cerulean was absolutely not just blue and television introduced us to a serial killer we were somehow supposed to like.
💻 WikiLeaks enters the chat
Julian Assange launches WikiLeaks with a radical idea: give whistleblowers a way to expose the secrets of the powerful. What starts as a very 2006 internet experiment will eventually unleash classified war files, diplomatic cables and stolen election emails — and put its Australian founder at the centre of a global legal battle.
👠 That's all
The Devil Wears Prada struts into Australian cinemas, giving us Miranda Priestly, Emily's withering one-liners, Nigel's wisdom and the cerulean speech. Twenty years later we're still quoting it, reassessing whether Andy's friends were actually terrible and watching the gang do it all over again.
🩸 Tonight's the night
Dexter premieres and introduces the surprisingly successful concept of a serial killer with a moral code. Michael C. Hall's blood-spatter analyst spends his days solving murders and his nights committing them — and somehow we're on his side.
🏉 Storm warning
The Brisbane Broncos beat Melbourne Storm 15–8 to claim the NRL premiership. A straightforward Grand Final victory at the time, but much juicier in hindsight: Melbourne were already inside the period later exposed as the club's massive salary-cap breach.
🎵 Get out. Leave. Right now. Again.
JoJo is back with Too Little Too Late, because apparently the men did not improve between ages 13 and 15. Meanwhile Ludacris and Pharrell want us to shake our Money Maker and knock SexyBack off the top of the US charts.
🐻 Another talking animal? Groundbreaking.
Open Season hits cinemas with Martin Lawrence as a domesticated grizzly and Ashton Kutcher as a one-antlered deer. It's peak 2006 CGI-animal saturation — but also the very first feature from the studio that would eventually give us Spider-Verse.
📚 A very expensive first draft
Former academic Diane Setterfield lands a whopping £800,000 UK deal for her debut novel The Thirteenth Tale. Publishers bet huge on a Gothic mystery from an unknown author — and, inconveniently for anyone hoping for publishing-industry schadenfreude, it becomes a bestseller.
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