August 20, 2021

LETTER 221

Struggling to Explain Australia's Covid Reality

By Besha Rodell

Saint Kilda Beach in Melbourne.Asanka Brendon Ratnayake for The New York Times

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. This week's issue is written by Besha Rodell, a columnist with the Australia bureau.

When I moved from Melbourne to the U.S. in 1991, I remember feeling as though Australia had just vanished. Phone calls were blindingly expensive, the internet was in its infancy, letters took a long time. The distance between me and the family and friends I'd left behind felt insurmountable.

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When I returned to Australia four years ago, the experience could not have been more different. In fact, I felt so connected to the friends, family and colleagues I left in the U.S., it took me a while to fully be in Australia, psychologically. I stayed up all night reading American news, texting American friends and interacting with my mostly American social media network.

The world is more connected than ever before, but recently I've begun to feel that insurmountable distance again. This time, it's because of the fact that Australia has experienced the coronavirus pandemic so differently from other countries, for better and for worse. I find myself struggling to express to people what our experience here has been like, and especially what these months of endless lockdowns have done to us, collectively and individually.

Late the other evening, unable to sleep and doom-scrolling, I came across this article in The Guardian written by an anonymous contact tracer in New South Wales. It is a fascinating read, for all kinds of reasons, but the thing that struck me the most was how much it read like a short story — like a fictional first-person account of life in some dystopian future.

Perhaps that's why, more than most news analysis I've come across, it manages to reveal the reality of life in Australia in this moment so vividly. Often fiction allows the reader to feel things more deeply than, say, a dry history of certain events. Of course, the contact tracer's story is not fiction; it is just a bare and honest accounting of reality. I wanted my friends and family outside Australia to read it, in order to understand what things are like here. To really feel how different our reality is from that of those living in Europe or Asia or the U.S.

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On Thursday, Melbourne entered its 200th cumulative day of lockdown. Another article, in The Age, does a good job of explaining what those 200 days have done to us as a city and community. It spells out exactly what "lockdown" here means — all the closed playgrounds and schools and days in which we have not been allowed to go more than five kilometers from our homes. The authors, Nick Miller and Maeve McGregor, write:

Our 200 days at home is longer than the Battle of Britain, shorter than the Blitz. At the speed of light, it would get you an eighth of the way to the nearest star. At average walking speed, it would take about 200 days (without sleep) to pace the entire coastline of Australia.

Not that you would have been allowed to.

I can tell friends and family overseas what it's like to be asked not to leave your home, to go for months without seeing siblings who live only blocks away, to not be allowed to go grocery shopping with your spouse — but the words feel empty. Can anyone truly explain the sense of claustrophobia and anxiety induced by closed borders, by living in a country we are not allowed to leave? Of the utter bizarreness of closed state borders, resulting in mini-migrant camps along the river that divides Victoria and New South Wales, full of people who are not allowed to go home?

I don't say any of this to complain. In fact, part of what I think might be so revealing about the contact tracer's story is just how far we here in Australia are going to keep people safe. My American friends could only dream of a world in which the government tries to figure out exactly where each and every Covid case originated, and to warn those who have crossed paths with those people to isolate and get tested. (And Australians could only dream of a world in which you could saunter into your local pharmacy and get vaccinated, picking your choice of vaccine from a menu, or hop on a plane for a holiday in Europe.)

For better or worse, our experience here is vastly different from the rest of the world. I feel separated from my overseas loved ones just as significantly in this way as I do in the literal sense. I expect that's true for many in Australia, a country with huge immigrant and expat communities. I feel almost as separated as I did when I left here all those years ago.

Here are this week's stories:

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Australia and New Zealand

Waiting for vaccinations in Sydney, Australia, on Monday. The national government's inoculation efforts have been widely criticized.David Gray/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Australia's worsening outbreak raises concerns about Aboriginal communities. With the Delta variant spreading, only 15 percent of Indigenous people over the age of 16 have been fully inoculated, well behind the national level, according to officials.
New Zealand begins a three-day lockdown after a single case is reported. The country has since reported seven cases in total of the Delta variant.

Australian state goes into lockdown as Sydney's outbreak spreads. Premier Gladys Berejiklian called the case numbers in New South Wales, now at the highest daily level since the pandemic began, "extremely concerning."

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