Pandemic Australia
It is hard not to be shaken by the daily figures, here in Melbourne in the suburb of Flemington, a place of elm trees and Victorian houses, wrought iron fences and towering brown commission flats from the seventies, crooked old pubs and abandoned old cattle yards. We are at the epicenter of the latest spread of the virus. It broke out in the flats a few weeks ago and the police descended on the place like an army.
There were tents and colored ribbons, ambulances and generators, it was like the circus had come to town. People in the papers and in the office muttered about the ‘conditions’ in there, in the flats, safe in their smug assumptions that immigration and poverty and disease all go together. Safe in the assumption that this is what the flats are. A place of immigration and poverty and disease. What arrogance. As locals we did not believe this, our kids and the flats kids go to school together, we shop in the same old shops along Racecourse Rd. Our lines are more blurry.
The rings of masked police and hysterical news stories felt wrong. We could not imagine the same lock down, a forced five day quarantine enforced by 500 police in black flack jackets. Dressed for war. If someone in a shining high rise apartment in the city, looking over the Yarra river perhaps, was to get the virus. They would not treat them the same way. They would not ring fence them into their rooms and refuse them exit. Block all the Mercedes into the basement garage. The lawyers would force them to leave and you would have front page accusations of brutality. But here they could do it, and the blind bigotry in their fear was shameful.
They wanted to stop the virus, whatever it takes, perhaps they imagined cornering it in the bottom of the flats and sending in some kind of crack medical team to kill it once and for all. They spoke of looking after the high needs of the most vulnerable. But they did so with Police. We sent plates of food, which were turned away at the barricades. We talked to a friend who was locked inside. She was excited at the attention, Melbourne had been ignoring the flats for 30 years and now it was on the news. It was exciting. It was terrible.
The newspapers trumpet the risk to us all and we have daily counts of the newly infected. 330, 270, 310, 727; the numbers blur one into another and the days are re-cast as emergencies. The bureaucrats jostle with doctors on the TV, both excited by the others company, both looking to each other for legitimacy. We want them to know what to do. We want them to act on the ‘medical advice’ because medical advice is a solution. Isn’t it? What are the rules now?
I work in a school and the kids fidget as they joke about the pandemic, they wait a little bit longer to check my reaction closely when we discuss the new state of the world. ‘You said that there would not be a vaccine’ they say in accusation, looking for the flaw in such a scary thought. It must be the teacher, it cannot be the world.
‘No’ I say, gently. ‘I said that the papers are reporting that some experts have their doubts about a vaccine’. ‘But I do think they will find one’. My own words ring untrue in the air but the students are happy to hear it. They look up at me in their masks, 30 masks topped with mullets and unreadable eyes; their facial expressions muted behind blue paper masks. They are in year 12. One had a panic attack the other day; heaving for breath, fluttering her hands in the air as if to mimic her surging thoughts, her eyes wide with the double humiliation of being so out of control that she would have a panic attack and then, as if that was not enough, to have all these students and teachers, actually see her having a panic attack, their eyes scanning for the source of her panic, unable to help her as she scanned them back and struggled to breathe.
There are automated hand wash stations dotted along the walls, as if clean hands would make it all ok again. They hiss and spray alcohol in a thin dripping mist; soaking your hand from cuff to fingertip and then evaporating to nothing ten seconds later with the faint whiff of cheap vodka. We wash our hands diligently five times a day. The skin is peeling from my own hands now, but I think it’s from the bright yellow spray bottles that we use to wipe down the desks before class, I make a game of it, let them laugh at my pedantic attention to the edges of my desk, my ostentatious attention to detail giving them a free ticket to disinfect their own desks, they relax after and seem more normal, as if they have clawed back a little part of their worlds and have it shining and fresh and ready for their future.
Our numbers here are low compared to overseas. We are lucky and terrified. The lucky country. We cannot complain, our hospitals are not too overwhelmed, our call centers are being deep cleaned, three schools a day close for cleaning. The borders are closed and the planes no longer fly. My baby girl; 8 months old, a constant climbing, grinning, toppling grabbing catastrophe; all blue eyes and screams of delight and excited crawls towards me. She looks at me blankly when I forget to take off my mask. All that is human is stripped from me and she looks at me like I am a mannequin, her face is still and uncertain.
My other two kids are in Primary school. The parks are closed with plastic ribbons. They turn to each other more now than they used to. Their social worlds have shrunk down to each other. My brave little preppies that fought so long to build the confidence to play with the others at school. They have not played with other kids properly most of the year. My boy wants to play computer games with me. My girl sits close more often. My wife, on leave for the baby, is tired at the end of the day and needs me to be an adult with her. A break from the kids; whose needs are usually diffused by schools and swimming lessons and friends and parties, and who play with each other so well, and with such brave young consideration, with such blindness to the unfolding silence in the streets that the tragedy is all the deeper.
People are dying and as a result all these things are all inconsequential in some ways, but in others they are not. These are the wider impacts of the policy decisions, of the curfews of the forced work closures. Of the failing businesses. There are a million tragedies unfolding and the bureaucrats look for scapegoats. Three girls who crossed the border into Queensland are accused of shoplifting and hounded by the media. They are black and the press follow them around. Their brother; ringed by cameras at the front of his suburban brick house, hemmed in by an intrusive crowd, he accuses the media of being racist. They assume he is too ignorant to understand the ramifications of his sisters actions, too ignorant to understand the way that controlling the vectors in a pandemic is a citizens first duty. They are racist in thinking this and he is vindicated by the glare of their lights and their rude questions.
Our Premier battles on and seems to be a good man, but he stands alone in the glare and the interstate sniping by his political counterparts takes its toll. He stands in the lights and recounts the numbers and repeats the medical advice and tells us all to follow the rules. I imagine there is a daily report to his office, his media releases are increasingly dominated by exasperated sighs and hectoring threats. Talk of fines of 1652 dollars, fines for parents who try to send their kids to day care, fines for families that do have someone who can look after the kids. Fines for those that have houses out of the city. Fines for those who travel too far to get indian food for dinner.
Yesterday his medical spokesperson Brett Sutton went missing. Do we pretend that they still stand together, or is it just the government and the virus now? Does it matter?
