I was with about twenty-five year nine students when my phone pinged with the news update: ‘Snap five-day lockdown for Victoria’. I was accompanying the students as a chaplain on a class retreat day. The year twelve leaders smiled as the news broke: it meant Monday’s assessment – their first year twelve certificate task – would be postponed. But after the initial wash of relief there was, or so it seemed to me, a longer pause. Might the promise of a ‘COVID-normal’ 2021 be illusory?
Two weeks earlier, Western Australia went into its own snap lockdown. Late last year South Australia did the same. Although in the latter case the lockdown was cut short, lasting only three of the six expected days. It shouldn’t surprise anyone if Victorians received the news of their lockdown differently. Last year Melbournians experienced 111 days in ‘hard’ lockdown, on top of the months of lockdown experienced across Australia earlier in the year. The strategy to subdue was successful, but it was also suffocating.
In December, feeling emancipated from fear of the virus, I went to Sydney. I was amazed by just how relaxed the feeling was. People hugged and shook hands, where in Melbourne we elbow-tapped at best. On trains and in shopping centres almost no-one wore masks. In the carefree harbour city, the whole atmosphere was different. The gulf in experience gave rise to a different outlook, a different way of being present and interacting with others.
Each of us has our own experience of the first COVID year. We do all share, though, some of the best results in supressing the virus anywhere in the world. We are not bearing the extraordinary levels of death and sickness, the long-term effects of which are unknown. We are not being communally scared by such catastrophic lack of social cohesion and government incompetency to manage the health crisis. Although we have taken an economic ‘hit’, we are better off than other western countries where the virus has been allowed to ‘let rip’.
Talk, though, of social cohesion and government competency is loaded here in Melbourne.
Take, for example, a message I shared to the family WhatsApp group on that Friday afternoon. Frustrated, I lashed out at the impending lockdown. To me, in the moment, it felt undeniable and matter-of-fact. But when it was met with apparent hostility, and the reply constituted of ‘better locked down than sick’, it was only