After shock: how Melbourne’s long lockdown changed the city’s soul
Even before this lockdown, Melbourne’s mood had darkened. In the weeks leading up to it, Cameron Stewart returned to his home town and found the city’s soul changed.
Matt Mullins is angry and more than a little worried. This part-owner of nine Victorian hotels, including the iconic Esplanade in St Kilda, believes that his beloved Melbourne is in trouble. He says the city’s brutal four-month lockdown last year and its knee-jerk reaction to any new Covid cases have done far more than cripple the city’s famous hospitality industry. “No one flies to Melbourne for the beaches,” says Mullins. “Those things that make the city so special – its art and culture and pubs and music and food and wine and coffee – have just been cast aside by what happened. We are going to look back in a year or two and realise that Melbourne is not the most liveable city in the world, not by a long shot. So much of that is just gone for a generation.’’
Melbourne made global headlines last year for the right or wrong reasons, depending on your perspective. Its second lockdown, from early July to late October, was one of the longest continuous coronavirus shutdowns in the world. From Washington, London and Europe, as well as in the rest of Australia, millions watched in amazement at the hardline policies employed by premier Dan Andrews to quell the Covid outbreak that emanated from the state’s failed hotel quarantine scheme and left 768 people dead.
They saw the police roadblocks. The curfews and fines. The 5km travel limit. The prison-like shutdown of public housing towers. The ghostly CBD. They read about the costs to mental health, to numerous businesses, to families and to freedoms. Yet they also saw how the lockdown led to a clear victory after the number of infections peaked at about 700 a day in late July/early August. The world’s media spotlight has long since moved on. But how is Melbourne faring after living through such a brutal and unique experience?
To the naked eye, the city is slowly returning tonormal. A modest number of office workers now queue for lunch in its once-deserted CBD. Hospitality venues are open, subject to density limits, the comedy festival returned, albeit it at half its usual size, and 78,000 people attended the Anzac Day Collingwood-Essendon clash at the MCG, the largest sporting crowd anywhere in the world since the pandemic began. Property prices are rising and Victoria’s economy is tipped to grow 5.3 per cent this year, outstripping the rest of the nation, according to Deloitte Access Economics.
But scratch below the surface and another story emerges. “People are still suffering a lot of psychological trauma in this city,” says Kosmos Samaras, a political consultant with RedBridge Group and a former state Labor campaign strategist. Samaras, who conducts political focus groups, says he is picking up numerous warning signs. “People are still very clearly bruised from last year and there is a sense that we haven’t seen the end of this yet.” Melburnians also feel that other states got off lightly when it comes to the virus and that the rest of Australia doesn’t understand what they lived through. “There was a real sense of isolation here,” Samaras says. “At the time [of the lockdown], when we asked our groups, ‘Do you think the rest of the country has abandoned Victoria?’, in excess of 70 per cent said yes.”
Stacey Harris, a Camberwell GP who specialises in teenage health, says something unexpected is afoot in the city. She’d thought the lockdown itself would have been the most difficult time for young people. Instead, she says her practice is being overwhelmed by teenagers with mental health issues in what she thinks is a delayed response. She believes the decision to close schools for so long was a mistake when much scientific evidence pointed to minimal infections between younger school-aged children. Victoria’s Public Accounts and Estimates Committee inquiry into the government’s pandemic response noted that 20 per cent of students will require support to catch up.
“People say Melbourne is bouncing back, but I disagree,’’ Harris says. “I think it has been seriously damaged by that unnecessarily long lockdown. What about all those young people who have been mentally scarred by what happened, by missing so much school when they could have been allowed to return much earlier? We will be paying for many years for that damage.”
I returned to my home town of Melbourne in March after living for four years in America as The Australian’s Washington correspondent. It felt as if I had moved not to a different country but to a different galaxy. In the US there were no rules or serious lockdowns, and coronavirus spread at will across the country, killing more than half a million people. In Melbourne the fight against Covid involved an extended lockdown enforced by a heavy police presence, Victorians turned back at the NSW border as they tried to return home from Christmas holidays, and a five-day lockdown in February this year – part of a statewide “circuit-breaker” – that was sparked by only a handful of cases.
The first thing I noticed upon my return was how much more heated politics has become. In America, the best way to break up a dinner party was to mention Donald Trump. In Melbourne I soon learnt that the subject of Dan Andrews had a similar effect. Half the table would savage “Dictator Dan” as the henchman who bungled the hotel quarantine system then turned Melbourne into a prison, sacrificing businesses, livelihoods and freedoms in a heavy-handed response. Others would laud him as Melbourne’s saviour, a leader whose willingness to make tough decisions and ignore his critics enabled the state to quell the virus and eventually resume normal life. If there is a large group of people who don’t feel strongly either way about Andrews, I am yet to meet them.
Opinion does not break down along clear political lines, I’ve found. Those who dislike him are more likely to have lost money during his lockdowns and the slow recovery; his supporters are more likely to have escaped economic harm. Andrews’ fans do not believe that the notion of ministerial responsibility applies to the premier when it comes to the hotel quarantine bungle. His critics do believe that he is ultimately responsible for the quarantine disaster and are puzzled that he has gotten away with it. A Roy Morgan poll in November put his approval rating at 71 per cent.
“My own family is divided over what Dan Andrews did,” says Harris. “I was passionate that what he was doing was wrong but my sister, who I am close to, believes he was doing a good job. I couldn’t accept that because I’ve seen so many people still suffering from what he did to Melbourne. My sister and I had plenty of fights but now we just choose not to talk about it.”
Says political consultant Samaras: “Across the dinner table you will have those who completely hate [Andrews] and then those who are almost Praetorian Guard-like in their defence of him.”
It is clear that the gruelling lockdown has left scars on Melbourne, physically, economically and psychologically. “It’s changed me forever,’’ says Laura Onciarich as she drives to her work as a funeral director in Melbourne’s north. “I’m one of those people who loved to go out and have fun and do a lot of things, but I don’t feel like doing anything now. I just want justice for Mum.”
Onciarich, 57, organised funerals for various Covid-19 victims but never imagined she would have to organise one for her own mother, Lina, who died in July after contracting the virus in her Craigieburn nursing home. Lina, 87, deteriorated quickly and Onciarich had to fight for permission to see her one last time. “I said to the manager, ‘What’s the difference if I come in there tomorrow with a body-bag to pick up my mum as opposed to coming in today to say goodbye?’ In the end I got to spend five minutes with Mum, just enough time to tell her we loved her,” she recalls as tears roll down her face. The next day she got a phone call saying her mum had died. “It hurts me so much that I wasn’t there and that she was alone when she died.”
Onciarich has been flirting with legal action and says she still hasn’t received an explanation or an apology from the nursing home. Like so many relatives of those hundreds of Victorians who died last year, the question of blame lingers. “In March, when it was the 12 months anniversary since Covid started, I began to go really downhill,” she says. “All these memories came up of Mum, the lockdown and the last time I kissed her. I am now looking for counselling to help me through because I am struggling more now than I was then,” she says.
Natalie Linton also suffers ongoing problems. As a nurse at a Covid ward in Epping’s Northern Hospital, she had patients for whom nothing could be done – and she would sit with them as they died so they were not alone. “We had patients who were young but really sick and also elderly patients from nursing homes,” she says. “They could only talk to their families on Skype and when they were dying they had no one next to them, just us. That was hard.” Then in June, Linton contracted Covid and became very sick. “It’s a horrendous virus,” she says. “I could not get my breath; just getting dressed took it out of me, and when I walked to the ensuite I had to sit there for 10 minutes before I could walk back to my bed, which was only two metres away.”
A year on, Linton, 30, has not fully recovered. There are hundreds of others like her in Melbourne for whom Covid was not just a temporary illness. “My whole life has changed,” she says. “Before I got Covid I was playing cricket, I was playing football and basketball and I would walk the dogs every day. But now I am so exhausted after working a few days in a row that all I want to do on my day off is sleep. So I have to work part-time now.”
Abdul Yarub is barely working at all as he sits in his small Aussie Forex foreign exchange booth on Spencer Street in Melbourne’s CBD. “You are the first customer I’ve had in three days,” he tells me as I exchange my last $US20 bill for Australian money. Yarub, 51, reopened his booth in January, hoping for a revival in business. But with no prospect of international borders opening, he says he’ll have to close again soon.
A short walk along Spencer Street reveals the lasting damage of last year’s lockdown on the CBD. Not far from Yarub’s booth is a boarded-up shop bearing the sign “Local tour bookings”. Next to that is a bar called Ubar, which is also boarded up. Then there is a Best Western hotel that is only opening its doors to customers next week for the first time since the lockdown; it has been used during the pandemic to house homeless people under a Victorian government program.
A few doors up is the Great Southern Hotel, which has partially reopened but is still trying to repair around 60 rooms that were trashed when the hotel halved its room rates to try to boost business. “We should not have cut our prices because the low prices brought in clientele which, shall we say, were not the usual, and we started having some very difficult experiences with them,” the hotel’s duty manager Bilal Hamid says. One day he says he saw an attempted suicide by overdose in the lobby. “Then on another day I got a call from a man in his room saying, ‘My girlfriend has overdosed and she is no longer with us, can you call the police,’” recalls Hamid. “So the police come and her body is unceremoniously carried out of here. How twisted is that?
“During the lockdown a lot of our rooms were permanently damaged by the guests, who chipped the walls, broke the windows, etcetera, and so we cannot sell those rooms out until they are fixed.”
Hamid says the hotel is slowly recovering, with healthy occupancy on weekends but still less than 50 per cent during the week. “But Melbourne is not what it used to be,” he says. “Before the lockdown there were people everywhere, there was so much happening. The city unfortunately is a shadow of what it was. You once had to fight to get on a tram around here. Not now.”
Elsewhere around Melbourne the story is the same. Popular shopping strips such as Acland Street in St Kilda, Chapel Street in South Yarra and Bridge Road in Richmond are littered with empty shopfronts. A survey by the City of Melbourne early this year found that 10 per cent of shops in the CBD had closed for good, with another 10 per cent closed temporarily. Because Melbourne’s lockdown lasted so long, the CBD was hit harder than in other capital cities and is taking far longer to recover. The key drivers of retail spending in the CBD – tourists, international students and office workers – have not come back in anywhere near the numbers needed to revive the city to its pre-Covid state.
Compared with the rest of Australia, office workers in Melbourne, having forged a work-from-home routine during the protracted lockdown, have remained stubbornly at home. The Property Council of Australia found that office occupancy in Melbourne’s CBD was just 35 per cent in March compared with 50 per cent for Sydney and more than 60 per cent for all other state capitals.
At lunchtime in Melbourne’s popular Degraves Street earlier this month, office workers stroll through but the tables in the middle of the street lie mostly empty. “Look at those empty tables,” says Johnny Sandish in disgust as he stands outside his café Xpressomondo. “Before the lockdowns you could not get a table and you could hardly walk through here it was so crowded. Look at this street – it is one of the most famous streets in Australia and it’s now nearly empty.” Sandish, 46, says that after closing for more than six months during last year’s lockdown, he needs to start making a profit quickly but he’s still losing money. “I am working 15 or 16 hours a day for nothing, only to try to pay my rent and my staff.”
Sandish says the lockdowns and the ongoing closure of international borders have scared away the tourists that are the lifeblood of Degraves Street. “This whole street has lost millions of dollars,” he says. “Dan Andrews has handled all of this very badly; if he had any understanding of business he would do more to help us. If Dan Andrews walked down this street today every business owner here would be swearing at him.”
But some of those hit hardest by Melbourne’s prolonged lockdown are grateful rather than angry at the government. “They made me feel like I was a prisoner in my apartment but I think they did the right thing,” says Uber driver Efrem Tsegay as he stands outside the public housing towers in Alfred Street, North Melbourne.
These towers were the centre of a global news story in early July when the Andrews Government ordered an immediate lockdown of nine public housing towers across Melbourne, confining around 3000 people to their cramped apartments in order to quell a Covid outbreak. A subsequent investigation by the Victorian Ombudsman found that “despite the best efforts of those on the ground, the early days of the lockdown were chaotic: people found themselves without food, medication and other essential supports. Information was confused, incomprehensible, or simply lacking. On the ground few seemed to know who was in charge. No access to fresh air and outdoor exercise was provided for over a week”. Although the Ombudsman criticised the manner of the lockdown, the report did find that it helped to halt the rapid spread of Covid.
Tsegay, 42, who came to Australia as a refugee from Ethiopia in 2005, recalls getting no warning as police swarmed in and “locked the door and left food”. But he says of Andrews: “For safety I think he made the right decision for us. He has done a very good job and I like him because now the coronavirus is under control and I can work and make a living.” Sitting nearby, Nara Ali, who fled to Australia from Eritrea with her son in 1993, says the lockdown inside her tower was “a very, very tough time”. She adds: “But I’m happy it happened. I can go out now, go to the shop, to the post office and live in a normal way.”
“Louise” sits in the corner of a room in Dandenong in Melbourne’s southeast and shuffles her car keys nervously as she tells her story. She had walked out on her husband before the pandemic hit, taking her two kids with her, after he had repeatedly abused and beat her. He had previously been jailed for three months for stalking her. But when Covid struck, he lost his job. “It meant he had a lot more time to do all the things he was doing to me,” she says. “He used his time to control everything else and harass and stalk me. It made things so much worse.” Her husband is now back in jail after stalking her for a second time.
Louise is now a client of the family violence support group Wayss, which saw a spike across Melbourne during last year’s lockdown. But the most alarming twist, according to its CEO, Elizabeth Thomas, is that domestic violence has spiked further since the lockdown lifted. In March, Victoria Police reported almost 800 cases of family violence to Wayss across south-eastern Melbourne, far higher than at any stage during the lockdown. “Think of the enormity of what Melbourne went through in 2020,” Thomas says. “The impact of that as a community does not change quickly. It’s not a rubber band, it doesn’t just snap back. People are still feeling economic stress, especially with the end of JobKeeper and the employment market still tight.
“We are seeing not only more instances of family violence now but the intensity of that violence is higher than it was before. We are seeing violence not only between partners but from teenage kids towards their parents.”
Sharon Patton, clinical manager of the mental health service Headspace in Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbs, is witnessing something similar. “It was such a significant lockdown, and the impact – especially on young people – is long-lasting,” she says. “We are seeing more cases now than at any time during the lockdown. In young people we are seeing significant anxiety, a lot of feelings of being unsettled about the future, uncertainty around work and school and what’s going to happen next with the virus. Suicide risk and self-harm risk is presenting a lot more and is a lot higher than it was previously,” she says.
“There is also a lot of resilience out there and there are a lot of people who have coped quite well, which is good. But I think we are in this for the long haul. There is no textbook on how to cope and raise a teenager through a pandemic.”
The trauma that Victorians went through in 2020 manifested in different ways when it came to crimes. Family violence rose by 9.4 per cent, drug offences by 20 per cent and sex offences by 10.2 per cent, according to Victoria Police’s Crime Statistics Agency. But property and deception offences fell by 12.1 per cent, theft from motor vehicles dropped by 14.3 per cent and robberies plunged by 28.7 per cent, in part because people were in their own homes for so long.
The city still seems on edge about what comes next. When Premier Andrews announced a snap five-day state-wide lockdown in February this year, Lifeline received 3306 calls, the third highest call volume on record.
But many who lived in the former Covid hotspots of Melbourne look back with gratitude that the virus was stopped in its tracks. At the height of the outbreak in late July and early August, the hardest hit areas were the outer western suburbs such as Truganina and Tarneit, with more than 346 active cases in the region. Minnie Singh was locked down in her Truganina apartment with her husband and two daughters, aged four and eight.
But the 39-year-old mother, who moved to Australia from India two years ago, brushes off what happened in her own suburb and points to the much greater problems overseas, including in her native India. “My lord, it is terrible back in India,” she says. “I have lost between 15 and 20 members of my extended family to Covid. So from my perspective Australia has done an incredible job and here in Victoria there are now zero cases. So Dan Andrews has done a superb job. I honestly believe he is a superhero for our times.”
Down the road, 73-year-old Norm Casser is standing in his garage painting an image of the Great Ocean Road’s 12 Apostles. “This is what the lockdown did to me,” says the retired locksmith. “I got sick of watching TV all day so one day I picked up a brush and here I am, still painting.”
He believes the lockdown was too long and too hard – and has seen its impact on his own extended family. “I can’t work out what I really think of Dan Andrews,” he says as he daubs paint onto one of the Apostles. “One minute I hate him, then the next minute he’s OK. I’m not sure how I’ll vote.”
The part-owner of the Espy, Matt Mullins, is less charitable about what Melbourne has been through. He says that both the federal and state governments have left the hospitality industry “to rot”, jeopardising the city’s status as the nation’s cultural capital.
Mullins won’t reveal the extent of the losses his business has suffered, except to say revenue is still “nowhere near” what it was pre-Covid. His hotels once employed 750 people – many of them 457 visa holders and short-term casual employees – but the workforce is now down by two-thirds, and “lots of those are not coming back”, he adds. He blames the way the federal government designed the JobKeeper scheme. “You know how much support is available for our industry right now? Zero f..king dollars,” he says.
Mullins questions why pubs are still subject to strict density limits while a footy ground such as the MCG can have 85 per cent. “For some crazy reason politicians seem to think our industry can survive this. Well, we can’t survive,” he says. “The AFL is not going to fall over and die. It will be here next year. A lot of these pubs won’t be.”
Mullins doesn’t believe the lockdown was necessarily wrong, he just hates that governments have left the industry without a lifeline to recover. He points to one of his properties, a “beautiful big old pub in the city” called the Waterside Hotel. “We had grand plans to rejuvenate it but then the pandemic hit. Now we are trying to work out what to do with it because, yes, it would be a lovely pub, but why invest in a pub like that when the government has shown that we could be shut down at any moment and left to rot?
“God knows Melbourne needs investment and new life and energy in the years ahead, but these are the sorts of consequences that come from this incompetence,” he says with a sigh. “What happened last year will be felt for a generation in this city.”
Postscript: In the days after filing this story, Melbourne went into its fourth lockdown. The anger and frustration I detected weeks ago have been amplified and any optimism doused. The shadows from last year’s four-month lockdown looms larger than ever.