Life after Covid: Our generation is taking things more seriously now
The end (hopefully) of the worst of Covid has meant big life changes for at least some of our Covid kids. So how do they feel? And what is their long-term outlook?
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They’re two years out of school and feel like they’re just about ready to take a seat at the big kids’ table.
They’ve participated in the electoral process for the first time after casting their vote in federal and state elections. They’ve made significant steps towards achieving their life goals. Some have already had multiple jobs. Some have moved interstate. Some have moved back again. Some have maintained the course they set when they were still in school. Others are on a new life journey.
Importantly though, they’ve (hopefully) seen off the worst of Covid.
They are a cohort of young adults SAWeekend dubbed the Covid Kids when we first met them as they left school in 2020 at the height of a global pandemic the likes of which the world had not seen for a century.
We touched base with them again in January last year, after their first 12 months outside of school was again dominated by Covid-19, social distancing, border restrictions, masks, lockdowns, vaccines and testing stations.
By the start of 2023, however, Covid has receded from the headlines. It’s been replaced by a variety of topics ranging from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to flooding in Australia and a cost-of-living and housing crisis.
For the Covid Kids, the past 12 months have been about personal growth and setting themselves up for the future. Some of them maintained the path they have been on since school. For others, that path has changed significantly.
Toby Judd started 2022 with a 2000km drive to start work as a station hand at an outback station near Cloncurry, in northwest Queensland. It was a dream job for the keen horseman, who harbours dreams of a career in the beef industry, and came after 12 months working as a pen rider at Tintinara.
But within a couple of weeks, he was back in Adelaide, keeping a vigil at the Royal Adelaide Hospital after his father, Evan, contracted Japanese encephalitis courtesy of a mosquito bite during a visit to Mannum, on the River Murray.
“I flew home ready to get set for a funeral, it was that bad,” Toby says. “He couldn’t talk, couldn’t eat, couldn’t swallow – it was awful.”
Doctors prepared the family for the worst. After weeks in hospital, Evan, 53, pulled through but the road to recovery proved to be a long one. He had lost function in his hands and lots of muscle mass, so Toby flew back up to the station but made the call to return home in July to help out on the family’s property at Eden Valley.
“I remember walking in the gate and looking at Dad and thinking I’ve never seen someone age so quickly,” Toby says. “It was like I left and my dad was 50 and I came home and he’s, you know, 75.”
The Urrbrae Agricultural High School graduate picked up some work shearing and started a cow breeding program on the family farm before moving to the Eyre Peninsula to work on a farm at Ungarra, north of Port Lincoln.
Toby accepts his father’s health battle changed his career path, but he’s content with his current situation.
“I loved Queensland, loved every bit of it,” he says. “I loved working with cattle and being on your horse and walking 20km a day with the cattle – it was an awesome lifestyle.
“It was just, you know, life opens doors and closes doors and the big man upstairs wanted me back here, so that’s where I’m at.”
Judd had his own health battle while working on the outback station in March after testing positive to Covid and having to quarantine in a tiny room for seven days.
Though the pandemic has faded from the headlines, he still takes precautions to avoid catching it again, mainly to avoid passing it on to his father, and his partner, who has an auto-immune condition which has meant she is unable to be Covid-vaccinated.
Like most of the Covid Kids, Judd is relatively happy with how the state dealt with the pandemic, but worries about forced vaccinations, especially for people such as his girlfriend who was unable to be vaccinated.
The end of Covid restrictions around the globe have paid dividends for Macie Roberts, who will spend the next six months on a cruise ship floating around the Caribbean, Canada, Bermuda and the Baltics after scoring her dream job as a professional dancer.
Roberts has spent the past two years studying and mastering her craft at Dance Force Academy in Tweeds Heads but will fly to Miami in February to start a six-month contract with Celebrity Cruises.
The new gig starts with a month of rehearsal in Florida before she will spend the next five months at sea. It will be a new experience for the Kildare College old scholar, who has never been to the US or on a cruise ship before.
“It’ll be really good – it hasn’t really hit yet,” she says.
The lack of border restrictions within Australia in 2022 meant Roberts was able to return to Adelaide to visit her family more often than the previous year, and Dance Force’s end-of-year tour was also able to visit Melbourne and Auckland, which were off-limits in 2021.
While lockdowns prevented some dancers from physically attending Dance Force’s Tweed Heads studio in 2021, rain and floods had the same effect last year. Roberts and a group of fellow dancers volunteered their time helping elderly residents of a nearby town rescue possessions from the rising floodwater.
Samuel Nitschke’s hometown of Loxton has also been affected by flooding in the past few months – but the Loxton High School 2020 dux has been busy forging his new life in Adelaide.
The keen space enthusiast will this year enter his third year of a mechanical and aerospace engineering degree at Adelaide University and, after multiple viewings of Top Gun: Maverick and experiencing a Super Hornet flyover of the VALO Adelaide 500, has his sights set on becoming a fast-jet pilot.
“I’m still looking to get into the space industry eventually, but have been more open to defence work in the meantime – so going through the ADF as a pilot or an engineer,” he says.
“I was working the other day when they had the Adelaide 500 going, which was incredibly fun, because they had a F18 Super Hornet flyover. That was the first time I had seen a Hornet in my life and I really want to fly one of those things now.”
Nitschke had been studying a double degree but dropped a science/physics leg to concentrate on engineering, and the multitude of university clubs in which he has become involved.
A highlight of 2022 was helping the uni’s rocket club build and launch a missile which reached an altitude of 1km, and he is team lead for Adelaide Rover Team, which is on the brink of manufacturing a robotic arm.
He also enjoyed a mid-year trip to Paris to attend the International Astronautical Congress, a journey made possible by the easing of Covid restrictions across the globe as fears about the pandemic gradually alleviated for most of the population.
After moving down from Loxton to start his tertiary education in 2021, Nitschke lived in a residential college in North Adelaide until moving into a rental house with some mates at the end of 2022.
But he dreams of one day buying his own home, and Adelaide’s restrictive housing market has usurped Covid on his list of things to be concerned about.
Footballer Kaine Baldwin also hopes to enter the Adelaide property market – and wants to do it later this year.
But the Essendon-listed AFL player has no plans to return to South Australia after the Bombers signed him on for season 2023 at the end of last year. Rather, he wants to buy a house to rent out, hopefully to his family, as he continues to establish himself as an AFL player.
The 193cm key forward played four games at the top level last year, was the club’s leading goalkicker in the VFL and exceeded his own expectations in his first full year of competitive football after back-to-back knee reconstructions.
“I wasn’t really expecting too much coming into the season, but a Round 1 debut and a few games after that was very good,” he says. “I definitely learnt a lot and I think that will be very useful going forward.”
The former Westminster College captain continues to study a Bachelor of Science at Melbourne University. He also dabbles in learning the French language on the side – a skill which came in handy during a 2022 post-season European holiday which included a couple of weeks in Paris.
The end of Covid-related border restrictions meant his family was able to travel to watch him play last year, and he debuted in front of more than 50,000 people at the MCG against Geelong – on a weekend the AFL welcomed crowds back to Melbourne after the Covid-interrupted years of 2020 and 2021.
Baldwin spent the last couple of years sharing a home with some fellow players and says he’s now settled in Melbourne and has no plans to return to an SA-based club.
“I actually feel a bit more like a Victorian than a South Australian,” he says. “I always love coming back to SA and seeing all my mates from school but, it’s strange.
“I always get back into Adelaide and am excited to be there and when I leave, I’m upset to go, but when I land back in Melbourne I’m just as excited to be back and back in the routine.” It was a tough year at Essendon, where head coach Ben Rutten was sacked and new chief executive Andrew Thorburn resigned within a matter of weeks.
But Baldwin says the club is on the mend and he’s excited about the prospects of 2023.
Singer-songwriter Tilly Tjala Thomas is also excited about the next 12 months, which will see the release of her second EP.
Thomas, who lives primarily with her mother in Westbourne Park, relished the relaxing of Covid restrictions in 2022, which allowed her to star at interstate concerts such as Big Sound in Brisbane and a Sydney reconciliation week event. She also performed at the renaming of a lane in Adelaide named after family friend and Australian music icon Paul Kelly and was named best regional artist at SA Music Awards
“I feel like 2022 has been pretty good for me in terms of getting out there and being able to perform,” she says. “Live music is starting to take off, and festivals, so that’s really good.
“I feel like I really kind of just need to do those interstate festivals. It’s going to help with my career and meeting people. That’s where I am at the moment – focusing on doing more of those festivals.
“It was kind of hard during Covid – but it was also kind of good because I was able to song-write – sometimes you just need a break from performing as well.”
Thomas started 2022 studying music at Adelaide University, but deferred to focus on her EP. She has also landed a job at Sturt Street Community School’s out of school hours care, where she plans to become involved in the school’s music therapy program.
She’s relatively positive about how society has come through Covid, but has had family affected by both the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the flooding in the eastern states.
Regardless, she counts herself as “pretty optimistic about the future” – an outlook shared by most of our Covid Kids.
Awur Deng is no exception. The third-year law and international relations student is the newly elected president of Adelaide University’s African Student Association and recently won a promotion to store manager of Stateside Sports in Tea Tree Plaza.
She says she has a more positive outlook on life than she did during the height of Covid, and reckons her generation is preparing to step up to more prominent roles in society.
“I feel like our generation is taking things more seriously than we have previously,” she says. “A lot of the people that I speak to who are really interested in politics, they know about what’s going on in the world, because it’s going to be our world eventually.
“And I guess that’s kind of hitting us now, like that we’re eventually going to be the ones taking over. That’s the reason we’re doing these degrees. The reason we’re studying and the reason we’re working is because we’re, you know, the ones that are going to be in power next. We’re the ones that are going to be having families next. And that’s really starting to hit, not just me, but a lot of people.”
Deng, like her cohorts, cast her vote in federal and state elections for the first time last year – a privilege she did not take lightly.
“We don’t want our vote to go to waste because we know, we finally realised, that our voice does matter and that we can actually make a change – we’re not kids anymore,” she says.
Despite the decline of Covid in the public consciousness, Deng, who lives at home with her parents and siblings, continues to sanitise her hands frequently and wears a mask whenever she feels she is near too many people.
She’s enjoyed the opportunity to hang out with friends without worrying about social distancing and remains focused on a career in the law before moving into politics.
Apprentice plumber Josh Vittorelli is also living at home with his parents as he saves money with a plan of purchasing his first home in the next four or five years.
With that in mind, increasing cost-of-living expenses and house prices have overtaken Covid atop Vittorelli’s list of things to worry about, but he says his outlook for the future has improved in the past 12 months.
“I reckon I have more of a pathway of where I want to go, where I want to be (than I did 12 months ago),” he says. “Last year, I didn’t know where I was going, but right now, I can see a small step of what’s going to happen.”
Vittorelli is in the third year of a roof plumbing apprenticeship with Old Port Roofing. He plans to stick with roofing for a few years yet, but hasn’t ruled out switching to something completely different in the future. He and a mate have even tossed around the idea of starting their own clothing brand.
He has avoided catching Covid and, apart from being tested before working at childcare or aged care facilities, says he has “pretty much forgotten” about the virus. His primary interaction with the medical system last year was treatment of a broken collarbone sustained on a night out with friends in the city.
Kimberlyn Selvan is hoping for a career in the medical system and got a foot in the door when she scored a job on the reception desk at Sportsmed Stepney Healthcare Hub.
The Adelaide University health and medical science student knocked back an offer to switch to optometry at Flinders Uni and also won a summer research public health scholarship.
Selvan is still living with her parents and is conscious of cost-of-living issues, but says it’s an issue she worries about less than she did about Covid during the peak of the pandemic.
But, like all of the Covid Kids, she’s much more upbeat about achieving her life goals than she was 12 months ago, when Covid was rife and restrictions tight after the SA borders opened just before Christmas.
“I think Covid was still playing a role in my life last year, but this year it hasn’t had much impact,” she says. “No-one in my family has had Covid, which is really good, but people around me have been getting Covid and have been close contacts, so it’s still there … but it’s a lot better than it has been in the past years.”
After two years of study Selvan has narrowed down her career path towards something in neuroscience or public health – or something that combines the two.
Madeline Ryan is well down the path of creating her dream career, after 12 months working in the tourism industry in Cairns, Queensland.
She started 2022 as a front office all-rounder at the Pullman Cairns International but switched to adventure tourism company Experience Co mid-year and is “absolutely loving it”. She deferred her diploma of travel and tourism management for a few months but will pick that up again this year, and has moved out of student accommodation to share an apartment with her partner.
Ryan barely thinks about Covid anymore and has switched from eyeing a career in tourism marketing to either becoming a business development officer or sales manager in the tourism industry.
“I think I’ve really found my niche up here and just been able to network so easily,” she says. “I’m really glad I work for the company I work for now because they are very strong on internally promoting and internally training.
“I just feel like I’m in a very good place up here. I’ve developed a love for all the tours and the water up here, and I couldn’t be happier to work in the industry I do, in the area that I am.”
The Trinity College graduate has seen first-hand the plethora of job opportunities available to young people looking for work, as tourism companies struggle to fill multiple roles.
Melbourne University associate professor in sociology, social and political sciences Dan Woodman says the current glut of job opportunities, many created by a lack of skilled workers in the wake of Covid-induced immigration restriction, will hold young people in good stead for years to come.
“People are getting a chance earlier, and in different areas, than they would have five years ago,” Woodman says. “This can be really, really important. It can have lifetime career effects if you get a smoother entry into getting that first job and getting a bit of experience.
“When you follow people (through their lives), you can see evidence of that (early chance) giving them a leg up a couple of decades later.”
The experience of starting their adult lives during the height of Covid will also stick with the Covid Kids and their cohort, Woodman says. “There’s no way going through this time won’t have some effects that last, for better or for worse, around being resilient to plans changing,” he says.
“There will be something around people’s attitudes towards things, whether that be how they think about their health, how they think about the future and the chance plans will change that will be affected by going through that experience as teenagers.”
Woodman is part of an intergenerational study called Life Patterns, which follows the lives of young Australians from the end of their schooling through to middle age. He says issues such as housing and cost of living had been high on the list of concerns of young adults before Covid, and had returned to the forefront.
“People are starting to put Covid behind them and the effects (of the pandemic) are varied – some people found it easy, some people talk about it redefining their whole life,” he says.
“But your story, and I think this is a common one, is a story of resilience and people getting back on their feet and looking forward.” ■
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