Patrick Carlyon: 2020 will be a year we’ll never forget, no matter how hard we try
As the sky darkened over East Gippsland exactly a year ago, little did we know we were getting an eerie warning on what 2020 was set to bring.
Patrick Carlyon
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The “apocalypse” should have been a sign.
As Victorians prepared to celebrate a new year, the sky darkened over East Gippsland.
Bushfires had raged for weeks across NSW and Victoria. Mallacoota was about to be hit next.
On December 31, 2019, hundreds gathered on the beach. Masks failed to filter the smoke as the sky dimmed to black, then blazed red as the flames roared through the township and razed more than 100 homes.
It would be the first crisis of 2020. A year cursed by uncertainty and emergency.
A year like no other.
A year to forget for most, a historical marker in stress and confusion.
A year when everything changed and notions of “normal” were redefined.
Nature ran rampant in 2020. First, the familiar grief of flames and dislocation, then a novel virus strain, spiked with proteins, which attacked the lungs, thickened the heart and claimed the most vulnerable.
Other things happened in 2020.
The finding of lost boy Williams Callaghan, was the feel-good story of the year.
Lawyer X legal machinations plodded an inexorable path to the truth.
We mourned the loss of batting great Dean Jones and were numbed by the deaths of Leading Senior Constable Lynette Taylor, Senior Constable Kevin King, Constable Josh Prestney and Constable Glen Humphris while they conducted a routine car stop on the Eastern Freeway.
Budgets, state and federal, broke spending and deficit records.
And the threat of COVID-19 shrouded every aspect of life. Its presence isolated the masses, leading to new buzz words such as “iso” and “COVID-normal”.
We were kept apart so as to stay together, went the message, testing resilience and stamina in ways no one had anticipated.
The virus’s rise compelled government decisions that disrupted the most assumed routines, closed businesses, paralysed the wider world, and challenged the values of an enshrined democracy.
The question of its origin will reverberate for decades.
On December 8, 2019, a man in Wuhan, China, was diagnosed with flu-like symptoms.
By the end of the month, more and more people were reported with unknown flu.
A few days later, after closing a market it suspected as the source, China told the World Health Organisation it may have a problem.
The lag in reporting was critical. It indirectly led to 1.63 million deaths and counting.
The virus would indiscriminately spread across the world, from Italy to the US to Brazil, conjuring the horrors of lonely deaths and overflowing morgues.
We didn’t know this at first. The idea of a pandemic burned slowly, almost as if denial was a useful defence.
The first four Australian cases were confirmed the day before Australia Day, when the nation once again set about hand-wringing and revisionism.
Arrivals from China were blocked. Prime Minister Scott Morrison in late February declared the pandemic threat, but it wasn’t until a cruise ship, Ruby Princess, berthed in Sydney on March 19 that the immediacy of the danger – and failed responses – came to represent many, many lives.
Of the 2700 passengers and crew on board, 700 would become infected with COVID-19. The people should never have been allowed to leave the ship to go home, or fly interstate or overseas.
An inquiry would establish the obvious truth — that this had been a monumental stuff-up. It was the first of several to afflict Australia’s pandemic fight.
Through March, controls were introduced. They were affronts to democracy and freedom, such as bans on mass gatherings, and mandatory self-isolation for overseas arrivals.
By March 19, Australia had banned non-Australian visitors. We were encouraged to work from home. Non-essential businesses were closed.
New case numbers were doubling every few days. Case trajectories were starting to replicate those countries hit before Australia’s wave.
Fewer than 200 cases a day rose to 2000 a day in 12 days.
Home schooling became a consequence of restrictions.
Families trying to earn a living — and many Australians lost their jobs almost overnight — puzzled out primary school maths equations as they fumbled for the mute setting on Zoom. Life became small and claustrophobic, and TV platforms such as Netflix recorded massive surges in viewership.
TV series became the pre-eminent conversational currency. Families would sit around and watch The Last Dance. Then Tiger King. Then Away.
The 2020 public shaming of people and companies deemed to fail morality measures led to extraordinary protests against products and people we hadn’t before thought to question.
The spectre of a Canadian author, Jordan Peterson, in writing against political correctness, exploded not so much for what he said but the backlash against his thinking.
Cancel culture, and its absurdities, rose in June when a beer company was dropped from some bottle shops because of its name.
It was claimed that Colonial Beer “created nostalgia” for a cruel time in Australia’s white settlement. That the beer was named after something else did not seem to matter.
The footy, the most stable of staples, became another blur of COVID-19 inexplicability.
The first AFL game of the season, Richmond versus Carlton, was played in front of no fans at the MCG. A few days later, the AFL suspended the season until further notice. No one knew whether the game would go on.
Dreadful tales materialised of Sydney nursing homes, where the virus had been introduced by workers doing shifts from home to home.
Yet social distancing, as well as mandatory quarantine, started to work.
As Easter approached and the prospect of non-family visits became real, national projections appeared optimistic.
Rumblings grew about the persistence of unprecedented restrictions.
In mid May, Premier Dan Andrews told the Herald Sun that “we are on the cusp of beating this”. We weren’t.
Days after he spoke, a night duty manager at a quarantine hotel tested positive. Something was wrong at the places where measures were needed most.
The Andrews government had botched the most crucial aspect of the response.
Cajoling, threatening and fining the public was not much use when the coronavirus was seeping through the supposedly impervious barrier between the locals and the infected. Here was a scandal to this day still unexplained.
Other states, under a national auspice, had adopted quarantine programs that deployed police and the defence force to oversee hotel quarantine programs.
Victoria opted for private security, an industry riven with underpayment and ghost shifts.
The use of the industry, as endorsed by faceless decision-makers of the state government, exposed Victoria to a second wave.
Stories went that guards had tried to trade sex from guests for freedom, and that guests were allowed to leave their hotels to shop.
Five security guards tested positive, as would members of their wider families.
By mid-June, restrictions on gatherings were tightened.
Yet exceptions were made.
The Black Lives Matter protest was allowed to go ahead in Melbourne in June.
It followed the death of George Floyd, a black man who was arrested and had his neck knelt on by a police officer in Minneapolis on May 25, and a wave of demonstrations in the US.
Fines for disobeying social distancing rules were being issued regularly, but Victoria Police felt that allowing the gathering would prevent outbreaks of civil unrest.
As new cases grew, Andrews — already a fixture at daily media updates in his North Face jacket — took drastic decisions.
Ten postcodes were placed in local lockdown.
His draconian approach would prove to be more strident and prolonged than the powers applied by any Western democracy.
Andrews addressed the quarantine bungles by calling an inquiry, headed by former justice Jennifer Coate.
He called the calamity “completely unacceptable”, but offered no insight into the political thinking that would cost more than 800 lives.
At year’s end, after the inquiry had claimed several scalps including Health Minister Jenny Mikakos, it still could not identify who authorised the use of private security.
Andrews apologised but offered no clarity.
July opened to grim scenes. Nine public housing towers were locked down. Again, the immediacy of the decision was found to be misplaced: health officials later said there was no need to imprison 3000 people without warning.
Residents’ tales of mental stress and an inability to receive required goods and medicines evoked the totalitarian measures of Wuhan, where officials had welded shut front doors.
Worse images awaited. The virus got into Melbourne nursing homes. The aged-care system, long underfunded, collapsed in a chaos of disorganisation and neglect.
Children could not contact their loved ones, much less see them. They were told days afterwards how their loved ones had deteriorated.
The first COVID-19 case at St Basil’s Home for the Aged in Fawkner was July 9. It was thought to be another six days before the 100 or so residents were tested, and in this time COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 residents had mingled.
Ivan Rukavina lost his mother, Marija, a St Basil’s resident, to the virus.
He could not get updates in her final days, and could not see her.
“Why wasn’t the world’s most liveable city ready for this?” he said after her death. “How much warning did we need?”
A few days later, Andrews announced a second lockdown for Melbourne. Six weeks, he said.
The second wave was coming. Citizens would be subjected to restrictions that no one had thought to apply in the first lockdown.
Melburnians would live under curfew, which hadn’t even been applied during wartime.
Face masks would become compulsory, prompting some to ask why face masks — if they were so important — had not been ordered the first time around.
A state of disaster was called in August. The state topped out at almost 700 new cases a day. The health department’s contact tracing system was overwhelmed.
Moves to update archaic processes would eventually be introduced, but 500 or more cases a day swamped the system.
The extreme measures were extended until October. Victorians became experts on “rolling averages” of cases.
In mid-September, the curfew was reduced and extra recreational time allowed. The numbers were dropping. The rolling average dropped to 22 cases a day, compared to 400 a day seven weeks earlier.
The AFL Grand Final was staged elsewhere for the first time. Clubs had endured hub restrictions, no fixed fixtures and gluts of games played to counter the weeks when no football could be played.
AFL chief executive Gill McLachlan never assumed success.
He asked for help — and received it — in a critical phone call with Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk. If she had said no to Brisbane hosting the Grand Final, McLachlan believed the game may not have happened.
That Geelong and Richmond appeared to manage the unusual privations of hub life best helps explain their places in the Grand Final.
Richmond rebounded from a 15-point halftime deficit to kick away and win by 31 points, its third flag in four years.
The same month, trade tensions with China flared again. China had been displeased when Australia spearheaded an international push for an inquiry into the pandemic’s origins.
Punishment, as enforced through so-called “wolf-warrior” diplomacy, was swift.
Barley imports from Australia were hit by tariffs, then beef exporters were targeted. China has since imposed limits on seafood and wine imports, and it’s unclear what further action it will take.
A growing international consensus suggested China was using Australia as an example for recriminations when a country spoke out against it.
October 26 was the first day since June 9 for Victoria to record no new cases.
The announced reopening of retail and hospitality, under severe limits, doubled as a reawakening of a city long steeped in grim resignation.
As the days of no new cases mounted and the weather warmed, Melburnians began reimagining their city.
Victoria had succeeded where most of the world had not, despite its national pariah status of the winter months.
The state “eliminated” the virus, if only temporarily, as the rest of the world bunkered in second waves.
Not all the symbols were optimistic: on November 3, the Melbourne Cup for the first time boasted an official attendance of zero.
Meanwhile, America went to the polls after a vitriolic campaign race.
Donald Trump had led the country with bombast and nonsensical tweets. Would his anti-establishment base support him despite the national failure to address the pandemic?
The result took days, coming down to close results in four states, but Trump’s opponent, Joe Biden, won after receiving more votes than any other candidate in history.
Trump refused to concede and launched myriad legal suits to contest the result.
The year ended with renewed uncertainty.
Australia had become a nation permanently braced for bad news.
Sydney, which had managed the risks better than Victoria, was struck by an outbreak in mid-December, muddling Christmas plans for many Australians.
This was the new normal, where chaos and confusion was confronted by restrictions and regulations.
A vaccine in the early months of 2021 offers an end. Until then, resilience will be called upon, and humour, too.
Of all the COVID-19 memes, perhaps the best was a mock Back To the Future movie billboard: “Whatever you do, don’t go to 2020.”
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