Now, this is a ‘real’ crisis and it’s time the whinging stopped, writes Matt Cunningham

THE challenges faced by my grandparents’ ‘generation bred a remarkable stoicism. But much of that has been lost in the 75 years since, writes MATT CUNNINGHAM

Most people haven’t heard of mock chicken sandwiches but they were a staple of times of crisis

MOST people have probably never heard of mock chicken.

My grandmother used to make it for me when I was a kid.

It was a throwback to the Great Depression, when food was scarce and real chicken often unaffordable.

Some genius back then discovered if you mixed onions, tomatoes, cheese and eggs with the right amount of herbs and spices you could come up with a sandwich spread that tasted a bit like actual chicken.

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My Nanna could cook up a storm using only the most basic ingredients.

Pikelets and scones. Corned beef with mustard sauce or vegetable soup, the key ingredient a copious amount of salt that could make the blandest dish taste like manna from heaven. It was a skill born out of necessity in a time when having any food to put on the table could be considered a luxury.

My grandparents’ generation was the last to really know what it was like to do it tough. They lived through two world wars and the Great Depression.

My dad’s family were the lucky ones. The closest they came to seeing the horrors of war were the Italian POWs sent to work on their farm in the 1940s. My mum’s parents lived through the Nazi occupation of Holland.

Their stories were too horrific to pass on to future generations. My mother’s mother saw more turmoil, sorrow and upheaval than most people will know in a lifetime, but I never heard her utter a word of complaint.

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For my generation, the one directly before and those that have followed, the coronavirus pandemic is the first genuine crisis we have lived through.

And it’s proving to be a revealing experience. With tens of thousands dead and millions out of work, it’s made a mockery of previous “crises” we had become pre-occupied with.

It’s just a few months since anxious students were striking over the “climate catastrophe”.

Climate change is an issue, but when paired with the perspective of a deadly pandemic, it is merely a challenge, and one most should be confident humans will adapt to.

For decade upon decade, particularly in Australia, we have had it so good we’ve almost had to manufacture these crises as a means of purpose. In doing so we’ve shed much of the resilience that was once considered a national characteristic.

The challenges faced by my grandparents’ generation bred a remarkable stoicism.

But much of that has been lost in the 75 years of relative prosperity that have followed since the end to World War II.

The coronavirus crisis has exposed some serious chinks in our mental armour.

The first signs here in Darwin came with the arrival of passengers from the Diamond Princess cruise ship that had been stranded off the Japanese coast for more than a fortnight.

Not content with having a Qantas plane sent at taxpayers’ expense to rescue them and put them up in more-than-decent accommodation at the Howard Springs workers’ village, they thought this might be a good time to have a whinge about the standard of their digs.

“I’m sure prisons are not as bad as this,” one of the passengers, Adina Morris from Malvern in Melbourne told radio station 3AW.

“It has been horrific; a horrible, horrible situation.

“It’s filthy. The floors are filthy, the little fridge is filthy.

“There is no hot water for a shower. My husband had a cold shower this morning.”

If having to endure a cold shower when it’s 35C outside is your idea of adversity, then you’ve probably led a pretty privileged life.

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And amid all this coronavirus chaos, it seems the more entitled someone’s upbringing, the more likely they will complain about - or even flout - the new rules we are all having to live under.

A cluster of cases has emerged in Melbourne’s wealthiest suburbs after people returning from a ski trip in Aspen disregard isolation protocols. Another has broken out in Sydney’s Bondi, where 10,000 people flocked to the beach just a fortnight ago.

Meanwhile, millionaire model Lara Worthington and her mother Sharon Bingle are complaining that the five-star hotel Mrs Bingle has been forced to quarantine in is not quite five-star enough.

“I don’t think this looks like a 5 star accommodation to me,” Worthington wrote on Twitter alongside four images of the The Urban Newtown hotel in Sydney.

“The next 14 days here for my 63-year-old mum who is showing heavy symptoms. This is unacceptable.”

We will learn a lot about ourselves in the next six months.

And when it’s all over it might pay us to sit down with a mock chicken sandwich and ask ourselves one simple question: “Do you think you’re worse off than your grandparents?”